BY MAHWASH AJAZ
A long time ago when the first parent told the first child that he must become a doctor, an engineer, an astronaut – that is when Imtiaz Ali began writing his story.
A long time ago, when a boy fell in love with a girl he could not marry, a girl that made him a better person, a girl that helped him become more than who he thought he could be – that is when Imtiaz Ali began writing this story.
A long time ago, when a girl fell in love with a boy who had so many demons it almost tore them apart, when the girl’s love became the problem, the solution and the salvation all in one – that is when Imtiaz Ali began writing this story.
Tamasha begins unlike any romantic movie – it begins with the story of the little boy who grows up into our hero. And this little boy’s childhood is important, his little flights of imagination, his tiny discretions, his failures and his anxieties. They are all critical. Because the anxious, conflicted man you fall in love with – is the sum of all these anxieties, these experiences. Love may win at the end but the man, the woman, the journey they take alone and then together – is of critical importance.
Imtiaz Ali’s stories are never brilliantly original so to speak. He never delves into the Anurag Kashyap or Dibaker Bannerjee or Anurag Basu or Raju Hirani paths who have successfully produced and created films that take the audiences into a completely different world altogether. He never claims he produces epics the way Bhansali or Ashutosh Gowarikar does, you never walk into an Imtiaz Ali film thinking it will have a big Karan Joharesque finale, you never hope think about political landmines the way you would in a Prakash Jha flick.
Yet Imtiaz Ali is all of that and none of it all the same. His films have soul, rivalling the likes of Three Idiots and PK. His films have conflicted heroes, at par with the likes of Vishal Bharadwaj. His heroines are feminists, created powerfully, not too dissimilar with the ways Bhansali, Basu and Kashyap have done. Yet what sets Ali apart from all of these directors, what gives his movies a decided and definite unique flavour is the storytelling.
Imtiaz Ali’s grasp of the mind and the conflicts of man vs. society have been displayed to perfection in Tamasha. Whether it was Jab We Met – a simple tale of a meet-cute and a boy’s love for a girl or the tale of a girl who falls in love with her abductor – the premise is never complicated. The plot is never the factor that suspends your sense of time and space in an Imtiaz Ali film.
It is the storytelling.
Tamasha is the story of every boy who has followed a path, never his dream. It is the story of the magic that happens when we let children listen to their calling. It is the story of the average man who is average because perhaps there is something else that he could have done to escape mediocrity – but couldn’t. Norms and society and doing what needs to be done – all becomes a part of the man’s story that works like a machine noon to night to earn a good living – but secretly loves writing poems. Maybe he likes singing. Maybe he wants to dance, “Magarrr log kiaaa kahenge” (What will people say).
The performances in the movie are breathtaking. Ranbir and Deepika do not miss a single beat in the entire film. There isn’t a single off note by any of the other supporting cast, ranging from the mad storytelling of Piyush Mishra, to the stern patriarchal reprimands of Javed Sheikh. Deepika and Ranbir look and sound like a hauntingly familiar symphony to the urban middle class. The struggle of being told that their generation is lazy and whiny and thus hold little value than the ones before us who gave up an awful lot to just bestow upon us simple pleasures. And while that is the absolute truth – it does not mean that the current generation has no conflicts or struggles. They’re just not as life-threatening as war or plunder – but in their own right, deserve attention and discussion.
The middle class man, for example, is a man who struggles with feelings of inferiority and thus resorts to irrational anger and breakdowns. Perhaps the man refusing to give alms to a street beggar, the man responding sneakily to the rickshaw driver, the man unable to understand why his fiancé left him – is the man who has never really been able to resolve his childhood anxieties and conflicts. He has never really been able to understand how his personality has shaped into the man that he is over the many years of adhering to the norms and becoming the person others wanted him to be – and never the person he wanted to be.
Tamasha is not a movie to be missed for many reasons – one of them being how it stays with you long after you have left the theatre. It is a movie to be experienced, to be understood on a personal level. Desi men and women can find many variations of themselves in Ranbir and Deepika’s depictions. Imtiaz Ali’s attention to detail, the drapery that sets the mood for a poignant tale, ranging from the dialog to the graffiti in the background, all help in proving once again that Ali knows his craft and knows it well.
Tamasha is, by far, one of the best movies Bollywood will have ever produced.
