Dee for Drama: Deepanjana Pal on Deadpool & Wolverine, and Barzakh

For the ageing star, violence acts as a pathway to desire. Fighting is very much a love language in Deadpool & Wolverine. And desire is everything in Barzakh.

At a mid-week morning show of Deadpool & Wolverine, the theatre is almost full.

In the queue for 3D glasses is a young man on the phone. “Right now there’s an important family event I can’t get out of, but I’ll be available after lunch,” he says. When he hangs up, his companion teases, “Family event, huh?” The man replies, “I’m here to pay my respect to Deadpool-da and Wolverine kaku.”

I lost sight of this distant relative of Deadpool

A rare recent work that leans comfortably into desire for the male body is Asim Abbasi’s Barzakh, starring Fawad Khan.

A rare recent work that leans comfortably into desire for the male body is Asim Abbasi’s Barzakh, starring Fawad Khan and Sanam Saeed. The six-episode series quickly unravels and becomes unwatchable, but it begins with a gorgeous sequence in which cinematographer Mo Azmi and actor Khushhal Khan perform the extraordinary feat of making the thin moustache seem impossibly sensual.

Desire is a dangerous, forbidden thing in Barzakh, but Abbasi and Azmi celebrate it through beautiful, fragmentary moments, such as the scene in which a young boy watches a man bathing, or the shot that shows Fawad applying kohl around his eyes.

The show’s overwrought attempts at being poetic and brainy do it no favours, but its depictions of longing and infatuation with beauty do afford the viewer some exquisite, unsettling moments. Moments that turn a two-dimensional scene into something almost tactile; all because of a gaze framed by desire.

Maybe it’s the vulnerability inherent in desire that makes audiences feel more comfortable with heroes who lash out than with those who sit with their longings. Still, in the midst of so much that is bland and messy, Wolverine and Deadpool do offer a rare thing: pleasure.

(To reach Deepanjana Pal with feedback, write to @dpanjana on Instagram)