Barfi: Review and Analysis

Last Friday i.e. 14th September I went to watch a movie. I had not expected much out of the movie. I always keep a very skeptical view about the freshness quotient and the story telling capabilities of the Hindi films. 

This was in middle of our term break and I had little else to do. A group of friends were going to watch this movie and invited me in. This was a morning show and I had to make some effort to be there in time. 

The movie begins with a meta-song, a song that refers to the moment then and there and is very self-conscious. As the movie is literally ‘inaugrated’, in the scene where protagonist is found sleeping on the statue, we see a fleeting glimpse of Charlie Chaplin. Just minutes earlier, the police chase was a pointer, but then director explicitly acknowledges the inspiration. Barfi also has multiple layers of storytelling and narratives. The music band players, who appear every time the story moves to a different track, help you keep track of these changes. These narratives flow in a nonlinear manner and film moves back and forth. But keeping a track is not very tough. 

The music is also better than the average hindi-film, but I lack the capabilities to write anything more about it.

The film is a tribute to the silent movies and their era. The choice of subject then becomes ideal for the movie. In the second half the domestic life of the two protagonists is inspired by Chaplin's Modern Times. Numerous chases, dance sequences and especially tricks pulled by Barfi are taken from some of the most famous silent films. The choice of the Murphy radio is also enigmatic but I could not figure out why it was specifically chosen. 

The director has shown women making independent choices, by showing the mother (who confirmed to the traditional roles) in a negative light. I initially thought that the director is probably criticizing the feminine materialist tendencies (no value judgment here) but then surprisingly the end is different. The heroine makes a different choice and it is shown positivity. The moment when she was leaving the house, and her husband warns her (and tells her not to return) evokes the memory of the last scene of Devdas. In Devdas, the husband is able to stop Paro from meeting Devdas, but not in this movie. He simply lets her go after making the choice clear enough. Challenged patriarchy perhaps….

Another metaphor repeated in the movie is the pressure cooker, which is used as a reference to the suffocating domestic boundaries that women find themselves in. This is a critique of the traditional Indian marriage systems. The film is also about the art of narrative as one subject can't hear or speak. The other can speak and hear but is not coherent. The third one is indifferent. 

The movie has is definitely worth a watch in order to enjoy a rare display of brilliantly thought out storytelling.