This is a potent memory palace. An old masala cinema of violence and catharsis. Of traumas and trials. Of final reckonings and poetic justice. All of this will have been ’short term memory’. To be kindled and rekindled through the length of the narrative and then forgotten once again. Between these two forgettings the film conjures up an entire heritage. One engages with it on the condition of a recognition that one is at a mausoleum.

Terminator-like, Aamir Khan straddles the film’s enigmas. He re-triggers a masala archive. He is an old school hero and yet he cannot remember too much. He is appropriately a bit like an automaton, a bit robotic in his movements. He is the machine of an older paradigm with the soul eluding him. The latter has long left the body. What remains is the shell, the remembrance, the trace.

It is also a tale of intrusions. The title suggests an old intruder. The film features a present one who must remove all traces of his intrusion. There is memory that must intrude for the story to take shape and then resolve itself. For those ghosts of the past to be summoned up, for the film to properly be a haunting the flesh must suffer all kinds of intrusions. The lead character is himself the ultimate intruder in a world whose coordinates have long become alien to him. He is the exemplary foreigner. What is most foreign to him is what he has always known.

This film is also a remarkable kind of copy. It remakes the Tamil original which in turn incorporates shards from Memento. Whatever the Tamil film means its essential mode is quite the norm in that cinema. The Hindi film however becomes a startling trope for the return of the repressed. An ambitious attempt to re-engender masala cinema from the ashes.

No one but Aamir Khan could have pulled it off. The actor puts his prestige on the line to convince a more than skeptical audience. He will be an actor in total command but also an interpreter of tradition. Of this malady. The forgetfulness of a heritage. The audience has for a long time been alienated from such an archive. Aamir re-opens the book. As he goes through his clues in the story the audience must also track these to remember what once was. As one gets to the final cathartic moments one realizes that this double move has worked all too well. No wonder the audience explodes at the end with cheer. The floodgates have opened. And yet.. perhaps the 15 min are up..

The Hindi film is superior to the Tamil original in very many ways ranging from visual style to narrative adjustments. If Aamir betters Surya in most ways Asin ‘copies’ herself equally effectively. Hers is a rewrite and she is up to the task in superb fashion. The first half depends on her comic timing and her infectious charm to maintain the film’s energy when the older, more subdued Aamir occupies center stage. Aamir magnanimously underplays things at this point and lets Asin take over for significant portions. He is nonetheless the film’s anchor in this star vehicle of a film whether in these segments or more obtrusively in the reels where he becomes the figure from Hell or the Hulk-like warrior, destroying everything in his path of fury.

But this is a beautiful couple we fall in love with and one we mourn when misfortune occurs. The love story offers the deepest emotional resonance because it is connected to a great moment of horror and inescapable, irremediable loss. This was always the truest lesson of masala cinema. Not everything could be redeemed or repaired — parents or siblings lost, childhood’s innocence wasted, friendships stained by love, life itself sacrificed to bring closure to the past. Ghajini is a very fluid narrative, always a bit of a thriller but it also provides truer catharsis than one has witnessed in an extremely long time.

As the film ends we are in claustrophobic bylanes and cavernous places where the final accounting must take place. The film’s arch fiend retreats from the ‘new’ to enter this ‘old city’ where there is a near physical representation of the story’s chief concerns. The pathways, the short circuits, the dead ends and blind spots of mind and memory. The film’s credits much like the Tamil original’s suggest these same neuronal networks. One encounters the known and equally the foreign at every turn.

Aamir Khan wisely chose the original director for this remake. No one in Bombay cinema today is perhaps capable of working with these commercial registers. The saccharine stupor of ‘Bollywood’ is all too potent. Murugadoss re-enters his earlier labyrinth to re-chisel and refine and the viewer almost travels the distance of an epic with this story.

A R Rahman’s music with its strong notes of melancholy and nostalgia on two of the key tracks here offers again better motifs for the film than did Harris Jayaraj on the original. Perhaps a couple of his catchier songs could have been given better treatment. One especially regrets the shredding of Lattoo. But these are minor cavils in a film where everything else works well.

For Aamir Khan this film adds another chapter to the astonishing chronicles he began with Lagaan. A glorious masala moment of ambition but more importantly of courage and conviction, not only in his selection of the subject but also in terms of his masterful execution as performer. As with everything else he’s done in this decade this most unique of star-actors currently working makes yet another bet, offers another chance to the industry. Ghajini is a major work, the year’s best film but also one of the best films this decade. One hopes the clues it offers are read correctly and soberly…

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