Movie Review: Tamasha (Hindi)
Fairly early in Tamasha, after Tara Maheshwari (a luminous Deepika Padukone) and Ved Vardhan Sahni (Ranbir Kapoor) have met each other at Corsica, introduced themselves as Mona Darling and Don without revealing their true identities, and moved in together, she finds Ved's library (or cafe?) copy of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 carelessly tossed on the floor. Years later and back in India, after that enjoyable mini vacation where they vowed to tell nothing but lies and let "what happens in Corsica, stay(s) in Corsica", both find themselves caught in a lie, a catch-22 situation. Tara realises she loves Ved, and frantically hopes she would bump into him at the cafe.
Ved, in the meanwhile, is caught in a rut. A stultifyingly routine life of getting up, going to work, sticking to rules, and coming back home to catch some sleep, before the alarm snaps him awake next morning to repeat the same cycle of events day in, day out. His life has become a tamasha (read spectacle) and he badly wants out of it. For his heart is elsewhere and he wants to follow it. Hesitant as he is for fear of what his father might say, his life, like a loaded gun waiting for the right trigger, spirals out of control when he does bump into Tara at the cafe.
That's when Tara realises she doesn't love the Ved who he is in real life, but the Ved whom she met in Corsica. She wants him to loosen up and when that doesn't happen, she breaks off with him however hard that is for her. She gives him the space he needs, shows him the light (like a tara, a star) to pull himself out of his emotional turmoil. He in turn snaps at her for psychoanalysing him, but soon realises he cannot live without her either. To do so would mean him shedding his humdrum farce of a life and embrace his inner Don, his real self. And to do so would mean him pursuing his dreams, of what he really wanted to do with his life.
It's this dichotomy in his personality, the constant tug of war between who he is and who he wants to be that makes Tamasha a heart-wrenching watch, even when it offers a cliched, simplistic solution to "Why always the same story? Why not be the master of your own story and rewrite it the way you want it to be?". Even when director Imtiaz Ali does the most criminal thing imaginable by making us pine for Tara (or Deepika or both, like Ved) when she goes AWOL post-intermission and the momentum slackens as the narrative shifts focus from "their love story" to "his story". Even when he drives home the film's central theme repeatedly several times, lest you don't get it, over the course of its 152-minute runtime. Yet for all its shortcomings, Tamasha is a beautiful film, one that has its heart in the right place.
That's when Tara realises she doesn't love the Ved who he is in real life, but the Ved whom she met in Corsica. She wants him to loosen up and when that doesn't happen, she breaks off with him however hard that is for her. She gives him the space he needs, shows him the light (like a tara, a star) to pull himself out of his emotional turmoil. He in turn snaps at her for psychoanalysing him, but soon realises he cannot live without her either. To do so would mean him shedding his humdrum farce of a life and embrace his inner Don, his real self. And to do so would mean him pursuing his dreams, of what he really wanted to do with his life.
It's this dichotomy in his personality, the constant tug of war between who he is and who he wants to be that makes Tamasha a heart-wrenching watch, even when it offers a cliched, simplistic solution to "Why always the same story? Why not be the master of your own story and rewrite it the way you want it to be?". Even when director Imtiaz Ali does the most criminal thing imaginable by making us pine for Tara (or Deepika or both, like Ved) when she goes AWOL post-intermission and the momentum slackens as the narrative shifts focus from "their love story" to "his story". Even when he drives home the film's central theme repeatedly several times, lest you don't get it, over the course of its 152-minute runtime. Yet for all its shortcomings, Tamasha is a beautiful film, one that has its heart in the right place.
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