RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL ARTIST

STARRING Manoj Bajpai, Tabu, Annu Kapoor

DIRECTOR Mukul Abhyankar

HHHHH

That face is the map of the human heart. No one does it like Tabu. Not when she sets her heart to it. After seeing her mis t’s act in Golmaal Returns, what a blessed relief to see Tabu back in form in Missing.

This time, she plays a distraught mother who on a visit to Mauritius ends up with her little daughter kidnapped. Nothing in Missing is as it seems. In pursuit of an ever-renewable suspense, Mukul Abhyankar’s writing lapses into the ludicrous.

The twists and turns in the plot are meant to startle in a very ‘boo’ kind of way. And some of Manoj Bajpai’s efforts are just not up to the mark. You see Manoj playing a sleazeball with a roving eye, for a large part of the lm he has to play a man trying to convince the cop

(Annu Kapoor, playing the Mauritian law enforcer with a remarkably researched rigour) that his lies are the truth.

In other words, a good actor doing a bad job of bad acting....

Complicated? But just the way Abhyankar wants the set-up. At every step he plants a red herring so red, one feels as though one is walking through a blood-soaked mine eld. Except that there is never an explosion.

In fact, the feeble writing and the unconvincing situations would have done the strained suspense in were it not for Tabu’s magni cent performance.

Playing a grieving mother whose emotions can’t be trusted, she brings a persuasive candour to her role. That face is lit up like a languorous lantern,

In Jahana, he immerses in politics and she in social service. But fate tears them apart, when they fall prey to the political motives of Dev’s uncle Avdesh (Saurabh Shukla).

On the other hand, Chandni aka Chandramukhi is an unscrupulous political strategist who helps Dev build a strong political image. She inadvertently falls in love with Dev, but Dev’s heart is all Paro’s.

Needless to say, the actual lm comes as a shock, for the off-kilter romance though meticulously constructed, is set in a convoluted plot where the centre-stage is retrograde politics. The romance is lost in the political maze. Also, the story seems to be set in some bygone era, for today’s rural India is not like how it is portrayed here. The characterisation too, seems forced and fabricated.

Also, the direction in some scenes appears amateurishly mounted. Case in point is witnessed when, Paro after being shot, lands in the driveway of the hospital wounded. There is no reaction from her co-actors.

On the performance front, Rahul Bhat offers a fairly decent portrayal of Dev but you fail to empathise with him, simply because of his poorly chalked out character graph and his equally weak onscreen chemistry with both the leading ladies. His performance uctuates from forceful to hamming, at regular intervals.

Richa Chadda as Paro, is equally lacklustre. Adding no nuances to her character, she walks through her role unenthusiastically. As Chandni, Aditi Rao Hydari does offer a bit of intrigue to her character, but her poorly etched role does not help her make the part memorable.

While the lm boasts of decent production values, overall it fails to engross you.

Troy Ribeiro

thanks to cinematographer Sudeep Chatterjee, who brings more life to Tabu’s face than all the aqueous shots of sun-soaked Mauritius put together.

The lm is worth a watch only because of her. Whether it’s the scene where she’s responding to the cop’s grilling questions or the one where she crumbles under the gaze of masculine of our

Any times, really.

If you are a Tabu fan, chances are you’ll nd it easier to handle the incongruities that surface throughout the lm. If not, the going might get tough for you..

Subhash K Jha