REVIEW: Tahaan is painfully slow

Recently a much-acclaimed Marathi film called Tingya bagged the best film award at the MAMI Film Festival. The film told the story of a young boy in rural Maharashtra crossing all odds just to save the life of his favourite bull.

Tingya opened in multiplexes with much fanfare and ran into almost-packed houses, which went half empty after the interval thanks to its slow narrative.

Much like Tingya, Tahaan too tells the story of the eponymous boy, albeit in rural Kashmir, who will go to any extent just to buy back his favourite donkey. And quite like its Marathi counterpart, this film too drags on indefinitely.

The story

Tahaan (Purav Bhandare) is utterly heartbroken when after his grandfather's (Victor Bannerjee) death his mother (Sarika) has to sell off everything, including Birbal, his pet donkey.

But all of Tahaan's attempts to get Birbal back fail and the donkey is sold off to an old man Subhan (Anupam Kher). Not bothering about the consequences, Tahaan follows the Subhan and his Man Friday Zafar (Rahul Bose) across the mountains in freezing cold.

Not seeing any hope of getting Birbal back, Tahaan traces his steps back home. Here he meets a dubious character Idrees (Ankush Dubey) who promises to return Birbal to him in exchange of transporting grenades and other ammunition.

To what extent will Tahaan's innocence drive him and shatter the normalcy in the Valley is the question the film tries to answer.

Where the film fails

Despite a very noble theme, Tahaan fails on two primary accounts – the lack of novelty in the story and the flagging narrative. As mentioned earlier, we've seen a similar storyline in Tingya where a young boy's love for his pet takes him to places he's never been to. In Tahaan too, the protagonist battles all odds for the sake of a beast.

The narrative too begins to drag as frame after frame you are shown the destroyed villages and the utter despondency of the people. It's not like one cannot empathise with them. However deep down one wants the story to go somewhere.

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