A Bandwidth Review: Tamasha review

Tamasha or 'How NOT to make a 3 Idiots'

Source: dailymotion

"Why always the same story?" asks the movie poster. Along similar lines, a storyteller in the film connects Ramayan with the Trojan War and tries to draw parallels between stories of the east and that of the west. He believes, and makes our protagonist Ved (later Ranbir Kapoor) believe, that the same story works everywhere. However irresponsible this might be, the director wants to tell us something at this point. But he is unable to do so. He seems too busy in brewing up something cinematic yet artful and woo the audiences that he takes up and drops many interesting motifs throughout the film and relies on cliched story elements to move his film.

The film opens on a stage where a 'Tamasha' is unfolding, the dialogues of which are some of the clumsiest piece of word jugglery I have heard in a Tamasha( and I have been to my share of Tamashas'). Then it gets interesting. We get to know a boy, who surprisingly looks pretty much a kid version of Kapoor and this kid is fascinated with stories of the old. He saves and steals his way to hear these stories, to watch them, and soon they become part of his life. He sees a 'Soni', a 'Juliet' a 'Sanyukta' in affairs steaming up around him and they make up his world. The frames get quite rich actually and you seem drawn to the film and then a cut and you are in Corsica. Corsica, a French island where this recent dynamic duo of Ranbir-Deepika has to fall in love. You never know whatever the reasons are for them visiting the place because they aren't really on a holiday and they sure aren't estranged there. 'Silly' might be the right word to justify the generation's penchant for exotic locales even when they have no money. And so it happens that our beloved Hero and Heroine end up loving each other through some cliched plot element, make some bizarre pact and 'enjoy' their hearts out. Then they separate and meet after four years but strangely our Hero isn't as mad as he once was and our Heroine doesn't find him the kind of turn-on he once was. They again separate, the hero gets a little mad and then some B.S, about a higher meaning in life and the movie is over.

Whoever thought this joke of a film was a masterpiece.

Ranbir Kapoor and especially Deepika come up with fine performances though. Maybe because they don't really have to act much as they play the quintessential Metro pair who somehow manage to create a love crisis and spend years trying to get over it. Ranbir's character, however, gets some other motifs to deal with but since his character is very loosely twisted between things, it proves too much for his acting abilities. Deepika, on the other hand, is better in those situations. At many points in the film, she builds up quite a connection with the viewer but quickly snaps out of it and you feel betrayed, wanting for more.

One peculiar thing that Imtiaz Ali has tried to pull in the movie is the notion that the conversations between the duo are not your usual filmy lines. Rather, he seems to think that real life young couples talk like this duo talks but this is where he gets pretty wrong. In a film where he is trying to convey how stories and Cinema has made up so much of our world, you cannot afford to miss the point that real life young couples, especially the pseudo modern Metro couples talk in stereotypical filmy tones rather than coming up with playful lines of their own. That said, the director loses pretty much the point of the film and all he manages to really put up is a half baked and meaningless rehash of a 3 Idiots scene.

The Music is rich at times but that too has its downs. Same goes with the production design which is exemplary in the Corsica sequences but dismal in the rest of the movie. One Filmfare that it must win is that in editing which you expect from someone like Aarti Bajaj. Sadly, we no longer get everything right in movies these days.