Imitiaz Ali believes in long expositions but he also believes in telling the entire story as a vignette or some times even as a single shot.
In the mountainous mediterranean island of Corsica, Mona(aka Tara) finds a book on Don’s(aka Ved) bed. It is Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Four years later, back in Delhi, she is seen hanging out at a book reading cafe called Social, reading the same Catch-22 from the beginning. Whether Mona has heard of Catch-22 before Don or not is a question for Ali but she clearly does not know why Don is on this french island reading this particular book whose title simply describes his life situation. That single shot of Catch-22 explains the double bind that Don’s life is caught up with.
There is another easter-egg that Ali plants in the very first scene of Tamasha. Ved is on a theatrical performance dressed as a mechanical robot walking on a non-stop treadmill. While the robot itself is in silver color, his heart is a red colored neon lamp. Later in the movie we see Ved’s unspectacular life in a recurrence, he wakes-up, brushes, eats cereal, puts on a coat & tie, dusts his car, gets stuck in traffic, politely holds the elevator door for the next approaching person, enters his office with a Starbucks coffee and a mindless good-morning wish. As an aside, one really hopes that the Starbucks was located somewhere in-between the ground floor and his office floor. How else will the empty handed Ved who gets on the elevator, enter his office with a Starbucks coffee. Ved has to jump out of this treadmill life to find his heart.
Tamasha unlike its tamil meaning(which just means jolly), takes itself seriously to explain the philosophy of carpe diem through Ved’s life. Along the way, Ved is touched by the Tara and her love. From a mediocre life as a forced product manager working with mediocre bosses and peers, Ved’s journey leads him to become a spectacular artist. Something that has been told a number of times on the Indian silver screen. And if the 20 somethings of India haven’t seen this enough, Ali’s version is complex, intertwined with love and layered with an artistic voice. However, so far, this is the most realistic version told on-screen due to one huge reason, it’s cast.
Ranbir Kapoor as he is often mentioned, is the best actor of his generation. Right from his debut, Ranbir has always been different. As a method-actor its easy to frame him as anyone from Al Pacino to Adrien Brody to Heath Ledger. In Tamasha, he convincingly plays the charming Don and a polite Ved. The popular choice is to love his role the charismatic Don but I preferred Ved where he had a harder character to play. He proves that in the scene where he becomes nearly bi-polar as his manager advises him to continue the ‘yes-boss’ attitude for him to grow within the corporate organisation.
Deepika Padukone as Tara/Mona, on the other hand, doesn’t really have a fully etched character arc. While one thinks Ali would develop her role, he uses Deepika as strong supportive character. But my biggest takeaway from the film was how awesomely she could pull-off such an indistinct role. As likable as she in Corsican country she matches Ranbir in the emotional scenes and bring-to-life a free spirited girl of the new millennium. As Don and Mona get romantically involved, she dishes out a menu of bleeped-out booty call services she can provide and throws away her shirt when her temporary boyfriend mentions about her cleavage at a different scene. As we expect to know more about this girl and what she does in India, Ali briefly shows a montage of her having a successful coffee tasting career only to make her move to Delhi so the story can continue. But what was she even doing in Corsica? Was it just because of Asterix in Corsica reference and why did she play along with Don as the fictional Mona? What was she searching for in Corsica? Either they lost all her backstory on the editing table or Ali chose to keep his heroine a mystery. Despite all of that, Deepika is ready for international cinema.
Imtiaz Ali chooses to integrate A.R. Rahman’s fantastic soundtrack deeply into the narrative just like Ratnam. However he also does something awesome and unique with the soundtrack. The song Heer Toh Badi Sad Hai is sung by a group punjabi performers at a random street in Haryana while the story of Tara unfolds in Calcutta. No one knows how and why these two locations are related and yet this works like magic. After the song, the singers don’t make it in the movie anymore. So its sorta weird but that’s what Ali’s movies are turning out to be.
The screenplay is so lucid that scenes from Ved’s imaginative childhood are spread throughout the movie. As a day-dreamer of stories, we see the little Ved imagine his catholic school parade to be prithviraj chauhan and samyukta’s medieval romantic marriage. The other time little Ved’s walks down the stairs from his study room, he sees the Aladdin genie greeting him merrily from the roof. While these reminds us the likes of Alejandro González or Almodóvar, Imtiaz Ali plays with all the knobs of screenplay in one sitting.
As one walks out of the theater, its easy to think of ‘3 Idiots’ that brought out the message of YOLO slightly better but that feeling soon fades away. Ali allows his message to emerge organically from his protagonist’s life even as he pauses briefly at the end to massively underline it.
With Tamasha, Ali joins my short & personal list of Indian directors to root for — Mani Ratnam, Vetri Maaran, Kamal Hassan, Myskin, Vishal Bharadwaj, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Anurag Kashyap and Imtiaz Ali.
