Waiting (A)

Director: Anu Menon

Cast: Naseeruddin Shah, Kalki Koechlin, Rajat Kapoor

Running time: 99 minutes

Waiting is the kind of film which silently infiltrates your system right through its running time and by the end of it leaves you completely drowned in its inherent melancholy even as the leads seem to have conquered their respective griefs. It’s in that cathartic moment you realise that some times it’s not what you wait for but the act of waiting itself which leaves you transformed.

There are two people in wait here. At a hospital in Cochin. One is the pro — Shiv Natraj (Naseeruddin Shah), whose wife has been in coma for eight months. The man has read every medical journal he could lay his hands on and he seems to have befriended every nurse, sweeper and receptionist in the building and almost made the hospital his second home. He believes she will wake up one day.

The other is the waiting newbie. Tara (Kalki Koechlin) has just flown in from Mumbai and is not even sure what’s happened to the man she’s got married to recently. She would soon learn that he’s had an accident which has damaged his brain and put him on a ventilator. Her endless wait begins even as she grapples with recent memories and her friction with faith.

Shiv and Tara would come together in the hospital’s 24-hour canteen and the two of them, separated by a generation, Twitter, expletives and more, would share their wait — and their anxiety. Shiv, who used to be a professor, would almost guide Tara through her waiting stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. “Whatever you choose to do, be purposeful while you wait,” are his big words of advice for her.

But Shiv himself is perhaps a little too purposeful as the doctor (Rajat Kapoor) makes it clear that his wife has no chance of waking up and it’s better to have her unplugged. Tara on the other hand is not sure she wants her husband operated upon. “He would have preferred a quick, dignified death rather than living like a vegetable.”

These uncomfortable questions and their debatable answers make writer-director Anu Menon’s Waiting such a poignant and thought-provoking watch despite the film being mostly a chatty indoor drama largely in English. Whatever the film wants to say about life, death and everything in between is cleverly disguised in confrontational dialogues and never gives you the preachy feeling.

The performances by both the leads are top-notch. Naseeruddin Shah, spotted in Himesh Reshammiya films and Sunny Leone-starrers these days, looks interested and invested in a character after a long time. That Shiv gives the feeling to the world that he is in control but is actually a helpless husband who has no clue of how to lead life by himself is brilliantly brought out by Naseer saab.

Kalki brings a lot of herself in Tara, who’s diametrically opposite to Shiv and almost always instinctive in her decisions. There are a lot of scenes where she is by herself trying to fathom the repercussions of the accident and waging the war with destiny in her mind, and she pulls you inside her world of pain every time.

Also deserving mention is the moving background score by Mikey McCleary. The songs seem like an afterthought, brought in at post-production to help sell the film.

Waiting is unlike any Bollywood film you’ve seen this year or are likely to see in the next six months. It’s a touching human document about the bottomless depths of grief and the indomitable spirit of love and how the two reside together. Waiting on each other. 

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