Tamasha review: as unrealistic as porn, but you can't look away

Rating: 3 stars

Once upon a time, there was a man. This man believed in love. Like many filmmakers of his era, he too decided that his voice about love should be heard. Unlike those filmmakers, his voice was unique. It walked the fine line between the heart and the mind, between art and commerce. His brand of coming-of-age love became successful.

INTERLUDE

But his critics accused him for making different versions of the same story. This affected the man. He began to try harder. He made his characters edgier and more self-conscious. He made their relationships more complex - almost as if they were deliberately unconventional. He had to prove them wrong. He had to prove that it was better to tell one story in several ways, instead of telling several stories the same way.

Also read: #Interview: Tamasha is coming together of Rockstar and Jab We Met, says Imtiaz Ali

EPILOGUE

And so, he ended up making a tamasha out of love. In his quest to find the most different, the most out-of-the-box way to contextualise love, he ends up creating a passionate 151-minute discourse on why it's okay to be different. Ironically, love - the romantic type - is merely used as a device to bring about this Rajkumar-Hirani-isque epiphany. And it is perhaps the weakest link of this story.

REEL IMITATES REAL

This man, Imtiaz Ali, has equipped his latest protagonist Ved Vardhan Sahni (Ranbir Kapoor) with a similar identity-crisis predicament.

Much like Ishaan Awasthi (Taare Zameen Par), Sahni is an artist - a natural storyteller - trapped in a misunderstood boy. Life is truly a stage for him. He sees vivid imagery, mythological characters and fictitious worlds everywhere; these opening 10 minutes form one of the most vibrant, visceral introductions to a Hindi film. The boy is dreamy and disorderly.

Unlike Awasthi though, he isn't fortunate enough to have a compassionate professor. He is made to go the 3 Idiots way, eventually becoming a corporate drone. The 'special' part of him is suppressed. The only time it surfaced was in Corsica, away from the pressures of civilisation, where he played Don to a fellow traveler's 'Mona Darling'.

Also read: Hope Tamasha gets the kind of acceptance Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani got, says Deepika Padukone

This is Ali's heightened version of a Before Sunrise scenario, where two strangers meet, love and cut off before the dream ends. What follows is a more sedate version of the Rab-Ne-Bana-Di-Jodi paradox: Ved spends the film deciding whether he is actually Punjab Power's plain ol' Surinder Sahni, or the loud, unabashed Raj Kapoor - the avatar that Tara (Deepika Padukone) fell in love with in Corsica.