Tamasha Review
Imtiaz Ali's Tamasha wasn't a regular romance of boy meets girl genre, it was the story of a boy and his inner conflicts; the way Ranbir's character transforms into a man, how Don becomes Ved and how Ved becomes Don. A story of self discovery, about finding oneself amidst the glitter and pressures of daily life.
It would be always easy to describe Jab We Met as a charming, candy-floss romance between a girl and a boy. Both characters suffer from infidelity and heartbreak and are united by destiny and Bollywood cliches. But Imtiaz Ali's cinema is always beyond the cult of romantic films and was more than just about romance. Rockstar and Tamasha, especially, were centered around a person who's yet to become a person. The stories of both the films centered around the protagonist's on a the road to self discovery.
When fans first meet him (Ved), he's on a vacation in Corsica, a unique and in contrast to place to travel, especially during a Hindi film hooked into London, Paris, and NY. He meets and befriends Tara (Deepika Padukone) and both spend their days in bliss with each other without revealing anything about each other. It's very rare for a Bollywood film to follow this template. Kapoor calls himself Don and Padukone Mona.
When Don and Mona come to India, Tara remains Mona whereas Don has gone back to becoming Ved. This is the conflict of the story, where a reality check dawns upon our hero like a bolt of lightning. This is where we sense the primary step towards his transformation, with metaphors getting into the narrative and his outbursts dominating his otherwise dour demeanor. How dare anyone tell him he is not what he pretends to be!
The story of Tamasha followed a similar theme as Rajkumar Hirani's 3 idiots, about following your dreams and desires. But that blockbuster was injected with boisterous gags and breakneck scenes between the three friends. Ali's film was filmed the way only Ali could have filmed. His films were always incomplete for his fans, without pain and longing, without gorgeous canvases and haunting melodies. Comparisons with Rockstar would be futile, both in performances and music, despite an equivalent name, albeit Ved's violent unpredictability echoed the emotions of Jordan from that musical.
In both the films, the person cannot stop brooding about the girl who has walked faraway from his life, one for his success and therefore the other for his rediscovery. Ali enjoys transformations of his characters with the assistance of heartbreaks. You know that within the end, Ved will eventually return to becoming Don, you only wait how the method would culminate. A film that's tilted Tamasha, there couldn't are a far better finale than Kapoor enjoying the applause of the gang and therefore the curtains coming down.
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