Corsica, Deepika And A Missed Classic
Corsica is a place for some, a state of mind for others.
Take a love story, give it the dash of adventure, a damsel in distress, a vagabond boy with a golden heart. Set them amidst churches and beaches, gurgling streams and minstrels dripping rural charm. Wine and dances, trysts with dunces. Raunch it up with sex: playful, casual, unburdened by the morality of another day, another culture, another generation.
Make them free.
Set them together with a made-for-each-other elegance.
Don't even let each other know their names.
Give it the abstract, tantalisingly dreamy essence of ideal romance.
Make them wear fashionable clothes.
Life is an ad, a reverie, a place where the knight in shining armour is a playful joker who defies straitjackets.
Give her the Vogue looks frame by frame. She romances the camera. The lens romances her.
Amid the clearwater streams and enchanting vines, there are jagged rocks that jut forth like truths: truths that reveal patterns of the mind, pathways of the heart and passages of destiny and fate. Twined like the pair, beauty and truth, romance and reality, life and living must cross each other. Romeo, Juliet, Heer, Ranjha. They go 2.0. Eternal figures in ephemeral settings, in search of each other and yet frail in their tentative lives. Their tales move back and forth.
The Tamasha begins.
***
She returns to her native land, to a charmed and delicate life of inherited privileges. Heiress apparent has put behind her Corsica days but its memories persist like Dali's molten clocks. Four years pass and it is time the plot thickened. So it does. Amid a dreary routine of corporate rituals, the romantic joker returns to meet the Juliet of our times in a cafe bump. This time he is a teller of corporate stories. Her Noritake heart breaks. Nooooooo!. He is now just a McDude with a McJob in a McCompany with McParents. Was it not Faiz who said: there are other miseries in this world than love? But the lady does not know, and a latter-day corporate Majnu is born, with more bubble than stubble.
So our hero, with a name as plain as Ved, must now be on the path to self-discovery. In the counter-intuitive plotline, true selves burst forth again, this time in anger and anguish. McDude must now escape his Dilbertian nightmare, his delicate self in dramatic contrast to a daily eunuch taunt and a smug, heavy-accented, patronising boss. Before the plot turns a 30-second commercial for Naukri.com, twists take us to the family history. Our fashionable heroine does not have much of a past, unless you know the Marwari sociology of Kolkata, or a copy of Asterix in Corsica that fired up her footloose fantasies to feel the Mediterranean breeze on her dusky glow skin. She has a heart though. Mother India Remixed for the New Millennium does not pull the plough. She gives it-will-be-all-right hugs to vulnerably lost storyteller protagonists fleeing corner-office tyranny.
At this point, what might have been a Casablanca of our times becomes a 3 Idiots-style do-it-yourself kit for lovelorn self-actualisers. Tamasha smudges itself into a hurried descent from a possible classic, all-time great status to a watchable flick. Deepika's feminine energy, the magnificent camera straddling Shimla and Corsica, the reflective focus on historic love sagas, the sensitive characters in an authentic narrative of beating hearts, and the cult lines of Irshad Kamil's lyrics and punchy-funny dialigues enriched by AR Rahman's textured music and Dileep Subramanian's wow soundscapes -- all pale in a quick cut-and-paste resolution of the plot.
Imtiaz Ali is a Fellini lost in Bollywood but in ironic contrast to his enlightened protagonist, becomes a victim of popcorn multiplex machinations. It still leaves him in the League if the Awesome but we wave our ticket on the back of which is written a small post-it memo: 'Are you, dear Imtiaz, the movie world's equivalent of Tendulkar in his 90s? Why this drag? Why should you Ishqise love more than is necessary? Why could you not inject some elegance in the unraveling to match your build-up?'
Do you hear me, Houston?
So our hero, with a name as plain as Ved, must now be on the path to self-discovery. In the counter-intuitive plotline, true selves burst forth again, this time in anger and anguish. McDude must now escape his Dilbertian nightmare, his delicate self in dramatic contrast to a daily eunuch taunt and a smug, heavy-accented, patronising boss. Before the plot turns a 30-second commercial for Naukri.com, twists take us to the family history. Our fashionable heroine does not have much of a past, unless you know the Marwari sociology of Kolkata, or a copy of Asterix in Corsica that fired up her footloose fantasies to feel the Mediterranean breeze on her dusky glow skin. She has a heart though. Mother India Remixed for the New Millennium does not pull the plough. She gives it-will-be-all-right hugs to vulnerably lost storyteller protagonists fleeing corner-office tyranny.
At this point, what might have been a Casablanca of our times becomes a 3 Idiots-style do-it-yourself kit for lovelorn self-actualisers. Tamasha smudges itself into a hurried descent from a possible classic, all-time great status to a watchable flick. Deepika's feminine energy, the magnificent camera straddling Shimla and Corsica, the reflective focus on historic love sagas, the sensitive characters in an authentic narrative of beating hearts, and the cult lines of Irshad Kamil's lyrics and punchy-funny dialigues enriched by AR Rahman's textured music and Dileep Subramanian's wow soundscapes -- all pale in a quick cut-and-paste resolution of the plot.
Imtiaz Ali is a Fellini lost in Bollywood but in ironic contrast to his enlightened protagonist, becomes a victim of popcorn multiplex machinations. It still leaves him in the League if the Awesome but we wave our ticket on the back of which is written a small post-it memo: 'Are you, dear Imtiaz, the movie world's equivalent of Tendulkar in his 90s? Why this drag? Why should you Ishqise love more than is necessary? Why could you not inject some elegance in the unraveling to match your build-up?'
Comments
Post a Comment