Let’s face it. Hindi cinema treats biopics as mere vehicles to drive home lessons on social evils. Makers have this incessant urge to tell a story that speaks to society or has an impact on a “larger audience”. They rarely delve into the psyche of the personalities, their fears or desires, but are more stimulated by critiquing the environment these subjects struggle in. It’s almost always an underdog fighting against all odds to victory. And if it’s a woman’s biopic, so help us God, the results will be even more creatively stunted. It will inevitably be an age-old recipe: womanhood being slowly heated on a scorching flame of patriarchy, sauteed with feminism and some dramedy added as per taste. A dated dish.
Directed by: Piyush Gupta
Cast: Huma Qureshi, Sharib Hashmi
Streaming on: ZEE5
Huma Qureshi plays the late chef and cookbook writer Tarla Dalal in writer-turned-director Piyush Gupta’s Tarla. The dentures, the specs, and the saris are all on point but the film doesn’t bother to go beyond appearances. We meet a young Tarla in college, daydreaming of doing something with her life. Soon, just like every other young girl’s, her desires too are bound in a bundle of holy matrimony and pushed back in an unfrequented corner. Luckily, her husband Nalin Kumar (Sharib Hashmi), a quality checker at a textile mill, is a ten-on-ten feminist ally (He even washes the dishes!).
Years pass and Tarla gets busy in the upkeep of the house and her three children. She still looks outside the kitchen window and ponders upon life’s purpose. What she is seeking finds her when a neighbour’s daughter, whom she taught how to make perfectly round rotis, gets married. The girl’s in-laws are so taken by her cooking that they even let her work after marriage. Mothers start hounding Tarla to teach their daughters culinary skills, to pave their way into a “good home”. Tarla opens a cooking class for young women. This brings me to the film’s feminism, which is less about questioning an entire system, and more about making do with what you have. She even tells the girls, “The path to your dreams can also go via the kitchen window.”
I understand. It must be too radical at the time to vociferously rebel against traditional systems. But the film feels too meek in its questioning. It also proceeds at a static, dreary pace, with the events in the late chef’s life being treated as mere pit stops. One doesn’t share Tarla’s jubilation when she launches her first cookbook, or her disappointment when its sales don’t take off. Sharib’s Nalin, at times, feels like a cardboard cut-out of a supportive husband. Huma and Sharib, both competent actors, don’t click together and their relationship lacks any dramatic urgency for the majority of the film.
In its bid to become a feminist tale, Tarla forgets it’s also a food feature. Except for stock shots of polychromatic spice boxes or inflating dough in bubbling oil, there isn’t much cinematic cooking happening. When it comes to recipes, the Batata (Potato) Musallam keeps making a comeback and there isn’t much exploration of the late chef’s other dishes. Subtly, but still, at times Tarla feels like it’s championing vegetarianism. In a comical scene, Tarla cries in disgust as Nalin relishes on mutton. She gasps a ‘chhii’ and also calls him a “disgusting man.” In another, she changes her seat in a restaurant as a customer is tearing away at a leg piece behind her.
Subtext aside, Tarla fails to excite. The film shares its titular character’s aimlessness. The opinions it serves feel stale and it doesn’t even pick up a fresh plate for the presentation. Her story or at least its depiction doesn’t stand apart from numerous other female biopics. In a continuous churning of content every week on OTT, Tarla is another assembly line product.
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