Watching Subhash Ghai’s Taal twenty-six years after its release is not the charming fairytale affair that one expected it to be. Taal has aged awkwardly. Walking the thin line between the earnest and the touristic, it eventually topples over in the touristic terrain.
A R Rahman’s music is still a treat to the ears. I have always said Ghai is a master musician and a tepid storyteller. The way he slides Rahman’s tunes into the narrative made me wish the plodding plot, with its groaning baggage of parampara sanskar, would just move out of the way.
The cultural clash between folk music and modern sounds is so weatherworn it feels like a harmonium moonlighting as a synthesiser.
Could we not just have the songs? They signal a phalanx of glory, short-lived as Ghai plunges into a plot about the shehar ka chokra Manav(Akshaye Khanna) and the gaon ki gori Manasi(Aishwarya), a sort of updated version of Rajendra Kumar and Sharmila Tagore in OP Ralhan’s Talaash.
Manav is supposed to be citybred and sexually savvy (though still a virgin from what we gather). Manasi is “innocent” and “pure”. This, for Ghai, means she will dance in the Chambal rain, oblivious of who is looking.
Voyeurism, you see, is not part of Manasi’s existential vocabulary. Neither is urban sassiness. So when Manav’s father (Amrish Puri, these tycoons, I tell you!) insults Manasi’s father (sanskari Alok Nath, later in the MeToo net), she quickly dumps Manav to become a hotshot singer-performer, groomed, mentored and lusted after by Vikrant(Anil Kapoor).
Vikrant is a bit problematic in his if-you-can’t-have-him-why-can’t-you-have-me wait-and-watch attitude towards Manasi. The sequences between Kapoor and Rai are the weakest link in the playing-by-number screenplay. This couple is meant to be mismatched. But so were Kapoor and Sridevi in Taal. The ice-cold vibes between Rai and Kapoor are one of this long, plodding romantic drama’s biggest undoing
As for Akshaye Khanna, does he ever have any chemistry with any heroine? He always seems to love himself more than his heroines.
Taal looks and feels like a self-important gazette on cultural preservation and the modern predatory sharks out to plunder the pristine heritage.
Too bad it seems to put its feet in the gobar quite often while wading through the Arcadia and sniggering at the mall.
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