‘Gustaakh Ishq’: Lost in translation

If you have a voice, you may also be poetic. If you’re neither, you’ve failed twice. But what happens when you have too much to say, and far too much poetry to stuff into every available crevice? You get ‘Gustaakh Ishq’ — a film that speaks, and speaks, and then speaks some more, until language itself begins to sweat.

It achieves the rare feat of making silky, gentle Urdu feel overbearing — even when spoken through the lips of the storied Naseeruddin Shah.

It claims to be set in 1998, though you’d never guess it from the hasty set design: perpetually dusty rooms and signage borrowed from another era. The coffee-soaked colour grading doesn’t help — painting a time that feels pre-Independence whenever it surfaces for air between the film’s heavy, heavy dialogue.

Arriving on OTT after a theatrical run in late November, the film follows Nawabuddin Saifuddin Rehman Rizvi (Vijay Varma), who inherits a dying printing press and uncompromising editorial morals from his father.

Rizvi is principled to a fault, and poetic all the more — traits never lost on you, because he will, time and again, inform you of it, if that wasn’t apparent by the shawls glued to his person.

Perhaps the only (accidentally) era-accurate choice is the makers’ belief that the film was meant for radio. Feelings, plans, histories — everything is dialogued. Expression and mise-en-scene exist merely as decorative footnotes. And what little isn’t said aloud is force-fed through Varma’s gratuitous narration, which follows you throughout — lest you, oh Urdu illiterate, miss the nuance that a sad face signals sadness and gleaming eyes infatuation.

Having rejected bedsheet literature ‘Bigadi Hui Ladki’, Rizvi is met with a “Lagta hai janaab sirf Aziz hi chaapenge” by the author. The name Aziz is a taunt for the writer, worry for Rizvi’s mother, and curiosity for him — facts I arrived at not by visual grammar, but because Verma tells me.

Aziz, once a roaring presence but never published, becomes Rizvi’s final hope. A cryptic phone call leads him to Malerkotla, where we meet Aziz (Shah) and his daughter Mannat (Fatima Sana Shaikh).

Shah plays Aziz like a rose pressed between old books — domineering, warm, and gently fading. Carved by the Gods, Shaikh’s recently divorced Mannat communicates more through her eyes than the film allows anyone else — her portrayal like a river that is slowly giving up its roar.

Varma moves with earnestness, grounding the implausible narrative like petrichor after false rain. Not being upfront about his publishing hunger, Rizvi woos Aziz by becoming his shagird, donning black on Mannat’s insistence. Aziz accepts with “Kaale libaaz waalon ke dil saaf hote hain” — a line so shallow that having one of cinema’s greatest deliver it borders on blasphemy. Somewhere, Rizvi falls in love with language itself; elsewhere, inevitably, romance blooms.

More than a film, ‘Gustaakh Ishq’ plays like an anecdote narrated over someone’s Pinterest board, where accuracy is sacrificed at the altar of aesthetics.

This is perhaps inevitable, with Indian fashion’s reigning aesthete Manish Malhotra serving as producer and costume designer. Director Vibhu Puri insists on spotlighting thick Urdu, history-laced Delhi lanes, and Malerkotla’s grandeur.

If overbearing is your peeve, the film is caricature. If not, it becomes camp: an elongated elegy better suited to a theatre stage.