Why Ta Ra Rum Pum is a must see film

By Staff

By: Subhash K. Jha, IndiaFM
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Now we know why the director is named Anand. Hrishikesh Mukherjee meets Walt Disney in this utterly heartwarming take on life's most serious and cruel jokes.

There's a moment in Anand's film where Rani plays that clichÉd sequence where the hero's fallen-on-hard-times wife rejects a fat cheque from her rich father. "I did the right thing, didn't I?" Rani asks her screen-hubby Saif, who looks aghast. "You turned down a cheque for 50,000 dollars? For that sum of money I'm ready to be compromised every day."

The above sequence is a strangely subverted interpretation of that sequence from Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Satyakam where Dharmendra's idealism was weighed against Sharmila Tagore's ability to ward off temptations.

Tara Rum Pum is like a romp through the highest emotional summits of life's lowest blows. Cleverly Anand situates this rags-to-riches drama of a spendthrift car racer, his cautious and principled wife and his two adorable kids(Sooraj Barjatya, roll over) in New York where the economically challenged family moves from up-market Manhattan to downtown Queens.

Cinematographer Binod Pradhan captures the underbelly of New York and the empty belly of racing-driver RV's family in a restrained rush of emotional adrenaline. Anand, God bless his unfettered soul, mixes the business of an absorbing riches-to-rags tale with tons of hyphenated homilies.

In the true Walt Disney tradition , the family makes the best of its challenged morality when it falls on hard times. There're moments , like the one where Saif's hungry little boy(Ali Haji, delightfully natural) devours a half-eaten burger retrieved from a trash can, where eyes turn to collective moistness.

You can't fault the director for pumping up the tears. Commercial cinema is all about the pleasure you derive in bringing the fundamental emotions of love and life together in a clasp of a giggle and a gasp.

Tara Rum Pum makes you do just that. Anand's screenplay is original from far. Get closer, and you see scenes from Days Of Thunder and a whole chunk from the Russell Crowe boxing film Cinderella Man brought to us in vibrant colours.

Saif, I'd like to believe, is a better actor than Tom Cruise and Russell Crowe. He invests the role of the roguish rugged dare-devilish and impetuous Fallen Hero with pathos and parody.

Watch him in the scene where he tricks his little daughter into staying back in their new run-down home as part of an imaginary reality show(it's a long story....let's just say Siddharth Anand knows Life Is Beautiful and not just for Robert Benigni ). Saif invests even the minutest moment with a tapestried irony. It helps to have Rani Mukherjee as a co-star. Though her make-up and clothes are all wrong in the first- half, Rani brings a thehrao and a emotional resonance to her supportive wife's part in the second-half where she has to stand by a man who has lost his heroic sheen and is a bit of an embarrassment to the mirror.

Next

Advertisement

Get Instant News Updates
Enable
x
Notification Settings X
Time Settings
Done
Clear Notification X
Do you want to clear all the notifications from your inbox?
Settings X
X