Have you ever felt that you have not found a pleasant end in your story? Like something soon ended, or perhaps something really never started but it still changed your forever. This kind of love talks about Imtiaz Ali. Their characters do not just deal with heartbreak, they live it. His films not only detect love, which needs to be achieved, they show it as a trip, often incomplete, often painful, but always transformative. The characters never have a long time with a long time, they chase the meaning hidden in the middle moments. The ‘concept of imperfection’ in his films is with us because how is this real life, raw, incomplete and incomplete.
We all have seen his films, Rockstar, Tamasha, Highway and even Laila Majnu, which he did not direct, but influenced production and depth. All the stories have a glorious breakup somewhere, but they do not stop in glory, they have spoken beyond it. He simply teaches in all his love stories that life does not end when life is over, it often begins there.
Love, I believe, the strongest feeling, and no matter how much we try to reject it, we are all deep in our hearts for a long time. As Sophocles once said, “A word frees us from all the weight and pain of life: this word is love.” Imtiaz does not show just one side of heart breakage, he shows that the heart breaks is just about crying, haw up and moving forward, it can achieve everything like a rockstar, it will break everything like Laila Majnu or it will discover you like a spectacle.
Imtiaz suggests that love does not always end in the union, sometimes it ends in fire, and this fire makes something that the world remembers forever. Like Janardan’s change in “Jordan” in Rockstar, he did not become what he wanted. Love and Heartbreak did it to him, it was so deeply cut that he started bleeding with music. His pain did not destroy him, it became a part of it. In his story, heartbreak art turned into art and may feel something in the world.
In Laila Majnu, Qati literally went mad, not really in a clinical way but in spiritual ways, what he did not love, it was devotion and his heart broke? This was his way for his spiritual awakening. Heartbreak can shatter you at first, but it can disturb you in a bigger way than you. Because remember, Qais did not need Laila’s physical appearance, he was so consumed by love that he started having hallucinations, and for that, he was enough. He did not become ‘Majnu’ by loving her, but was destroyed by that love.
And in the spectacle, Tara’s rejection discovered the Vedas himself and it reveals the version of the Veda that the love was pointing to all. Tara did not cruel her out of cruelty or because she stopped loving her, but out of deep expectation that she could find herself, and she did not break our hearts to move away from the Vedas, in fact, it became the most beautiful part of the film. Imtiaz uses emotional pain in the form of a gate for introspection. Their character is not a victim of heartbreak, they are of its shape.
IMTIAZ also provokes one thing that we all yearn after the breakup, ‘closed’ but he shows that the closure is not what we need, we need to understand. Because Jordan never got closed, nor cusecs, nor is it completely fine. Life is not about closing, it is about embracing pain and taking it forward easily. And similarly love is not the ultimate destination, it is the path of self-love.
Imtiaz Ali does not use heartbreak as a plot twist. For him, the heart breaks is pure. Yes, it is painful, but it is also a place of truth, deep emotion. And perhaps that’s why we are very related to it because he sees us in the most broken, raw and real moments. And the best thing is that he does not show heartbreak in the end, he shows himself the beginning. Because as a human being, no matter how shattered we are, we still expect somewhere in our hearts and their stories remind us that life, development and even beauty (beyond everything) after heartbreak.
As the Oscar Wilde said, “Heart was broken.” And maybe, in that braking, we meet ourselves in the end.
(The opinion shared here belongs to the author and does not reflect the ideas of Zee News.)
