23 Years Of Irrfan Khan’s International Breakthrough, Irrfan Spoke On Being Dubbed A ‘Sex God’

Asif  Kapadia’s  The Warrior was a masterpiece  that didn’t  define any  specific period  of time in history. And though it traversed an epic territory  subsuming the  parched sands  of Rajasthan and the nourishing snow of the Himalayas  , the film didn’t   belong to any particular  geopolitical reality.

Paradoxically  its timeless theme and location taking its protagonist   on a  journey from sanguinariness  to serenity,  roots it strongly and indelibly  to  a contemporary reality.  Because Asif Kapadia’s fabulous fable of one man’s journey from bloodshed to nirvanic peace isn’t located in a  geo-historical reality it has relevance that can only grow—never diminish—with time.

 Aptly, that’s the effect the film has on our consciousness. The Warrior grows on us like a redolent vine.  Every frame  moves us towards an existential realization about the quality of human life and how the most precious values of existence  invariably get waylaid in the whirligig of ambitious greed  and  frantic  mindlessness.

   The unnamed armed and ruthless protagonist (Irfan Khan) qualifies every man’s journey from debasement to atonement. Khan plays Everyman and No- Man simultaneously. His soul flaps its desperate wings against an opaque windowpane in the hope of finding a heaven beyond his hellish predicament as a man who has sinned savagely and lost dearly. Finally he doesn’t really discover the  magic mantra to Utopian never-land. But he’s still at peace with himself.

    The Warrior balances man-made   brutality with natural beauty ,   poetry with plunder  without lingering on  the lyricism of the essential tragedy underlying the drama. The story per se is fable-like in its simplicity. An unthinking desensitized warrior(Irfan Khan) carrying out brutal acts against nomadic  peasants  meets his nemesis on a  plundering mission when an amulet hanging from a little girl’s neck reminds the blood-soaked  warrior of a life beyond death and savagery.

 The moment of reckoning is so sharp in  its vision of elemental  emotions of anger, passion, shock , realization and guilt that you feel Asif Kapadia’s film was structured around that moment of unvarnished truth. The divine magic of that moment lingers as the  burning sand under the Warrior’s feet turns into cooling snow.

  Kapadia’s narrative never resorts to cinematic subterfuges to cast a spell on us. The  magic of the cosmic order is  emblematized with such virile fluency, we wonder where the film’s motivating energy comes from.  The chilling silences that swathe the frames are part of the film glorious sound design.  There are no “sound effects”   in the narration. The effect , whether visual or aural emanates from the cause that  compels the protagonist to undertake his redemptive journey.

     The  second snowcapped section  of the journey lacks the singleminded concentration and immediacy of the first sand-swept half when the  protagonist, on losing all that is most precious to him because of his savage deeds, sets off into the mountains for atonement.  The irony  in the second-half whereby the converted warrior is accompanied by a vagabond Riaz(Noor Mani)  who turns out to be a casualty of the wandering warrior’s violence, isn’t lost on the narrative.

 Kapadia’s vision telescopes a world of infinite suggestions and hints that are barely concealed under the narrative’s facile ‘spaghetti-western’  surface.  Critics abroad have cockily compared The Warrior with Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West. But this so more Kurosawa- land than Leone-kingdom. We are swept along in the sandstorm and  the landslides of the warrior’s uphill progress in a tale that’s ultimately as healing as it is stimulating.

  The contrast between the  Kurosawian magic of the hinterland and the savage compulsions that guide the protagonist through the sand-and-snow terrain is, to my mind, a cinematic leitmotif never attempted or achieved in a  Hindi-language film. Kapadia’s cinematographer  Roman Osin portrays the scorching yellows and pristine whites of the contrasting locations as two sides of the human condition. The camera’s quest for a middleground between  journey and destination, search and solace is so captivatingly crystallized in every frame, we feel we’re  peering into the very soul of mankind to extricate that  unspoilt part of our being which craves for release.  Dario Marianelli’s music creates strange and stirring echoes in the inner and outer chambers  of Kapadia’s  mottled universe. The music is so rich in sublime subtexts we feel we can touch the very essence of the timeless emotions through the sounds of the spheres.

  In many senses Irfan Khan is both an emblem of the human quest for nirvana(very closely affiliated to the Mauryan emperor King Asoka who relinquished war and bloodshed for Buddhist non-violence)  and a tortured individual seeking answers to cosmic questions that have no answers in the scriptures or the apostles.  While Irfan  Khan disappears into his character of the man gone from  violence to peace, Shah Rukh  always remained outside his character.

       Though the remarkably layered film is suffused with natural performances Irfan Khan is as central to  Kapadia’s scheme of storytelling as a steeply sharpened sword to a  warrior’s vocation.  For long neglected, under-used and grossly misused, Khan emerges with a performance that screams in its silences and  speaks in its pauses . There’s hardly a frame without Khan  . And rightly  so, since his presence is  integral to the film’s basic thesis of retribution and redemption . Khan’s eyes convey cruelty and compassion with equal fluency. It’s hard to imagine any other actor endowing the warrior’s role with so much of the  Samurai’s grace and Shakespearean pathos.  With this one performance Khan joins the ranks of the all-time greats.

Asif Kapadia’s Warrior in 2001 brought  Irrfan  Khan a volume  of global  acclaim he   had never witnessed before. What surprised him the most  after Warrior was that people were talking about his physicality. “People were talking about my looks and body language!  I was even called a sex god when I was in London !  This kind of critical pampering was new to me. I began looking at myself  with new eyes.”

 Warrior  was  the first  project where Irrfan was  cast as a hero. “I’m indebted to Asif Kapadia for seeing  a hero within me. The character  allowed me to convey everything from compassion to  sensuality. People loved my  big  eyes which were initially seen by some as  a handicap. That used to hurt. I remember as a  child my father  used to  say , ‘Yeh aankhen hain ya pyaala hai.’ After Warrior I was made to  know what he meant.  I’m glad that I waited for Maqbool and Warrior instead of succumbing  to the temptation of doing too ay  crass films.  If I had my way I’d only do such multi-layered films. These films allowed me to be minimalist.”

   After Warrior the international projects started pouring in.  “Yes quite a few, including one from Ridley Scott about the fight between Jews and Palestines. I was offered the role of a Muslim leader. I can’t understand when and how I became suited for dark roles. When I passed out of the NSD  I was offered roles of noble sensitive gentle souls. I was soon bored with them. After I played a negative role in the soap Banegi Apni Baat I  was given the job of scaring audiences relentlessly. My first film role was in  Ghaat. Since I didn’t get  any really good offers I  succumbed to doing roles I wasn’t very happy with. I was surprised to know that the makers of Warrior wanted specifically me.”