Movie: Highway
Director: Imtiaz Ali
Cast: Alia Bhatt, Randeep Hooda and
Rating: ****
Imtiaz Ali’s characters are always on the run. In Jab We Met, you had a live-wire Kareena eloping in a quest to marry her first love, in Love Aaj Kal, you had an unprioritised Saif chasing ambitions ahead of his love, while in Rockstar, you had a clueless Ranbir desperate for a tragedy to embrace fame and here, it is Alia Bhatt who wants to just travel, stay housed amidst the hills,clean her house by herself and live her life the unplanned way, savouring each moment as it comes. She never gets a chance to do so her entire existence this way. Born with a silver spoon and a victim of abuse in her early supressed childhood, she is so deprived of freedom that she feels jailed at home and confesses of experiencing freedom in the presence of her captor.
Highway, being a road movie with its ideas of ‘finding purpose along the way’ is totally free of all the commercial forced-fit-ins that you can possibly think of. There is ample time provided for the viewers to travel with the story. With also just about the right gaps between dialogues in tandem with that apt blissful silence when sufficed by picture poetry, the narrative proceeds with so much soul and leisure that you wouldn’t want to complain much about aspects on the lines of a progressive screenplay or the ‘two’ character monotony while watching it.
The tale on whom the plot entirely surrounds, Meera, donned by Alia Bhatt, always wants to escape reality for she is tired of its fabricated nature. Regardless of the person she is with, she says ‘Thodi Door/Der Aur’ as she desires to stay in her norm-free dream world for long with barely anything positive awaiting in her stale present. You can see her joyous face speaking a thousand words when she slips into tears while watching the waters surrounding her flow.
Meanwhile, you wonder if you’re watching a different film of an Anurag Kashyap when you have talks about goons, guns, murders, powers and influences raging in, initially. But within enough time, the psyches of characters are discussed, the best and worst facets of a relationship between a captor and a captive is depicted in the most unfettering of manners by Imtiaz Ali that the need of it being a visual story is justified adeptly.
Even the kidnapper (Mahavir by Randeep Hooda) is helpless but to open up his emotional facets where the duo do a lot to make peace with their past and also make amends for their future. They never make conventional promises of being together for a lifetime, but take enough courtesy to understand each others lives well that they would want to let this phase pass uncomplainingly. They know that they are heading a perilous territory when it comes to their relationship, but all this talk is mere calculation for the two who are just living a dream of theirs. The character-development is so complete that the maker doesn’t make the narrative akin to an indulgence anytime.
Alia Bhatt’s best is witnessed herein the span of 140 minutes as she bursts with energy and breathes life into the part of Meera Tripathi, be it her shades of frustration, joy, pain or helplessness, she surrenders to a surreal book-like role. Equally brilliant is the rugged Randeep Hooda intentionally labelled Mahaveer for his appearance who shows his incompleteness in his life through his eyes. Fully shot in India, the live native sounds and cinematographic detail are of supreme quality in addition to AR Rahman’s worthily credited ‘original’ score that is a genuine reason to enhance the impact of a simple, disturbed yet path-breaking girl. Don’t miss this !!
Review by Srivathsan N, who had originally written it for Cinegoer