Tamasha, Imtiaz Ali's latest film, is fortified with all the strengths the director's movies usually possess and weakened by a number of the same flaws. And just like most of his work, it is wonderful and frustrating.
Here, too, is a man (Ved Vardhan Sahni, played by Ranbir Kapoor) who is broken and can only be fixed by the loving ministrations of a woman (Deepika Padukone's Tara Maheshwari) he puts through the wringer. Here, too, are the existential dilemmas of well-off folks who need to find themselves through tourism and romantic adventure in verdant, picturesque lands, far away from the quotidian distractions of work, family, and real life. Here, once again, are mental health issues, not fully understood or explicated, and eventually fixed rather conveniently, as they invariably are in his happy-ending films (Jab We Met and Love Aaj Kal before this one), by requited romantic love and the successes that love inspires in the world of his films.
But Tamasha, like the rest of the films in Ali's oeuvre, mines an almost spiritual sort of wonder from the notion that romantic love warms the great, cold gloom of life into something meaningful and transcendent. Ali has a way with making love's most ineffable experiences visible in his films. He insinuates himself into the companionable silences of kindred spirits, captures the barely contained heat that rises off lovers, simulates with an astonishing keenness of eye the childlike joyousness, the sun-dappled idyll of falling in love and the sad, clanging hideousness of trying to fall out of it.
I found myself reacting intensely to Tamasha's conception of love as a force of freedom and for good. The film's lovers, in its halcyon Corsica portion, form a jolly, candid friendship right away. They feel emancipated by each other to find in themselves the sweet, unchecked vigor of childhood and also grow toward better, less phony versions of themselves. They both challenge and comfort each other. Well, Ved is challenged and comforted by Tara; the narrative shortchanges her and focuses on him. She is rounded out not by Ali's screenplay but by Padukone's generous performance. As she has been in all of her recent work, she is the cynosure of every scene she's in, bringing to the bracing, unembarrassed Tara a shimmering transparency.
Ali's vision has, in spite of its steadfast faith in the redemptive enchantment of love, darkened with each film, and he lets the shadows swallow his lead players whole before they find their happy ending in Tamasha. They lose hold on their dignity, their sense of self, even their sanity before they are allowed to find their way back to each other. And Kapoor and Padukone together are so vivid, so easy that I was convinced that their characters ought to be together, once he figures his shit out, of course. Some may, with good reason, find her acceptance of him at the end too facile, even masochistic, but I bought it. Padukone turns into a creature of light and air when she's around the version of Ved that isn't a boring little office drone. (Ranbir, with his French beard, bad posture, and flattened out speech, plays this tedious, unctuous, flavorless man, the one who the girl would dump for the leading man in other love stories, with as much care as he does the flamboyant pixie that is, according to the film and Tara, Ved's true self.) When the two look at each other, you believe they're seeing each other.
But before he makes their match, Ali constructs an idealist's argument for the the value of a fully examined life. Tamasha is a lyric battle-cry against anodyne conformity. Ali calls, like Rajkumar Hirani (in 3 Idiots) and Zoya Akhtar (in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and Dil Dhadakne Do) before him, for the liberation of the (generally straight, cismale) self from conformity through joyous art-making, lovemaking, and travel. But he makes his case with wit and audacity, creating a kind of arch collage of image and sound for his film. He directs his actors to play straight, and stages stretches of the film with casual naturalism. But he also calls attention to the artifice of film as a medium of storytelling with playful, showy touches. He marks "chapters" with French pulp illustration-style title cards that reference pulp Bollywood movies. He slices up the narrative often so the audience is kept just a smidge disoriented by the back and forth of the non-linear narrative. He spins a haze of golden, wine-soaked glamor all over the couple's romp in Corsica, which unspools with a delightfully relaxed unpredictability, and then shoots the Delhi portions like a thriller, mostly at night (the daylight scenes are mostly of Ved going through the motions, again and again, at home and work; if one were to name an Instagram filter inspired by the tone of these parts, it'd be called "Antiseptic"), with silences that are always on the threshold of ominous. He has the characters from the tales little Ved likes to listen to (in a flashback marked "flashback") haunt the streets of Shimla in costumes clearly realized in the imagination of a child. (Laxman is wearing a school-uniform sweater under his bow.)
Ali also makes cunning, unexpected use of AR Rahman's score; troupes of balladeers in Punjab sing to the audience as Tara struggles to recover from her love affair in Kolkata. An autorickshaw driver is seen, in his memory, singing a lusty folk number, while he reminisces about his past glory in the presence of a lost Ved at a roadside dhaba. The sad, sweet Agar Tum Saath Ho plays as Ved leaves Tara, his walk slowed to the herky-jerky movement of an eight-bit video game. All this showy technique doesn't bug, however, since this is, after all, a film about finding new ways to tell old stories and choosing new stories to tell about oneself.
Tamasha and its protagonists are idiosyncratic enough, its play of wide-eyed hopefulness and quiet despair compelling enough, that the film develops an appealing strangeness that overcame, for the most part, my instinctual desire to roll my eyes at its earnest insistence on individualism in a story about pretty, privileged, able-bodied people in a society that sets very few challenges in the way of their path to self-actualization. Tamasha's weirdness, and the radiant conviction of its female lead, save it from smugness.
