Director: Piyush Gupta
Writers: Piyush Gupta, Gautam Ved
Cast: Huma Qureshi, Sharib Hashmi
The great irony of Tarla — which is inspired by modern India’s patron saint of vegetarian recipes — is that the one near-decent food shot in the film is of a piece of mutton. This is not intentional. The mutton is being eaten by Nalin Dalal (Sharib Hashmi) and his enthusiastic chomping isn’t supposed to seem appetising. To his strict vegetarian wife, meat eating is disgusting and the audience is probably supposed to agree with her. However, Nalin savouring the mutton is one of the few scenes in Tarla when the focus is on food and the enjoyment it brings. When it comes to the vegetarian dishes that should be the star of the film, neither the camera nor the script can drum up much enthusiasm.
Inspired by the life of cookbook author, television show host and amateur chef Tarla Dalal, Tarla tells the story of a woman who finds her calling when she’s asked to teach young women how to cook. Tarla (played by Huma Qureshi and a set of patently false teeth) tells her students that if they can make delicious, vegetarian food, they can win over their families (particularly in-laws) and defeat patriarchy. Whether they want to wear jeans or get a job, Tarla claims to have a recipe that will do the trick (not that we get even one recipe in the course of the film. Instead of recipes, Tarla gives life lessons, many of which seem to have been written with Instagram Reels in mind).
Tarla’s stupefyingly silly theory about the subversive power of food turns a blind eye to the minor detail that historically, women have been excellent home cooks and this did little to give them agency. Even within the world of the film, Tarla’s simplistic logic doesn’t work. When her building society gets annoyed by the stream of outsiders coming for Tarla’s classes, she shows up with laddus to pacify the irate men in the society, but the tactic fails. The society members have the laddus but refuse to let Tarla conduct her classes. Despite this obstacle, Tarla is determined to make something of herself and we see her go from strength to strength. Meanwhile, there are reversals in her supportive husband’s career, which causes friction between the otherwise happily married couple. Tarla is about how the couple navigate the challenges they face.
You’d think that a film that is ostensibly about a chef who is famous for having experimented with and simplified recipes from all over the world, would be filled with shots of food and cooking. However, Tarla’s screenplay stands out for being disinterested about cooking in general and misguided about vegetarian cuisine in particular. For instance, the film would have us believe that replacing chicken with potatoes in murgh mussalam is a brainwave when even the most amateur of cooks knows that there’s more to making vegetables tasty than dunking them in a one-flavour-fits-all gravy.
Most of the time when food is shown in Tarla, it’s depicted as unappetising. Non-vegetarian food apparently transforms regular people into cavemen so that they don’t just eat meat, but tear flesh off bone with violent gusto. It would seem like the film is demonising meat eaters but for the fact that vegetarian food is not shown to spark much joy in people’s lives. At one point, when Tarla is perfecting the recipe for ragda pattice, we’re shown that she makes it again and again, but without any hint of what tweaks she’s introducing. The scene inspires no craving for this beloved street-side snack. In fact, there’s a whole song that describes how sick Tarla’s kids are of eating the recipes she’s trying out on them. Early on, when Nalin and Tarla meet as part of an arranged marriage setup, she feeds him gajar ka halwa that has red chilli powder mixed into it. Had director Piyush Gupta and cinematographer Salu K. Thomas spent some time on Instagram and picked up a few tips on how to film Indian food, this scene could have shown us a tempting heap of glistening halwa only to undercut the romanticised visual with the sight of Nalin breaking out in sweat and having a coughing fit because of the unexpected spice. Instead, the halwa looks like orange gloop and the scene relies on Hashmi to salvage it with his acting.
Fortunately for Tarla, the talented Hashmi is equal to this task and manages to elevate the film’s mediocre script at certain points. He’s able to make Nalin come across as a complex and interesting man whose best intentions falter when his wife’s success hurts his male ego. Unfortunately, despite Hashmi stealing the spotlight, the film’s protagonist is still Tarla and Qureshi has none of the sparkle she’s shown in previous projects like Monica O My Darling. In and as Tarla, she teeters between theatrical and lacklustre. Qureshi has the most screen time of the cast, but Tarla is not written to show any kind of character development and Qureshi fails to add any complexity or charisma to the titular role.
Tarla’s greatest failings are that Hashmi is the only character you really care about and the film has none of the geeky enjoyment in food and cooking that a story about a chef needs to have. It’s also a thoroughly dissatisfying ode to Dalal’s legacy. It could have been delightful to see Tarla figure out how to make an eggless baked Alaska or adapt a Thai curry for the Indian vegetarian palate. There was an irreverence with which she changed recipes in ways that would scandalise purists, like making risotto with ghee and lasagna with tomato ketchup. That she didn’t hesitate to tweak classic recipes and cheerfully cherry-picked from haloed food traditions shows curiosity, boldness and confidence. Yet in the film, the food we’re shown adds little to our understanding of Tarla. Her relationship with food seems perfunctory and functional. We’re not shown how she grows to love cooking or how it becomes important to her, which makes Tarla fail as a food film. It’s even less satisfying as a story about a self-made entrepreneur because the film doesn’t explore the business sense that led to the real-life Dalal creating an empire out of her cookbooks and ready-to-cook mixes.
Although there are elements taken from Dalal’s life, Tarla doesn’t feel like a biopic. Little effort is made to establish the time in which the story is set. Names are changed as are some dates. Incidents are tweaked, possibly for the benefit of what the makers believed would make for a more dramatic plot. For instance, Dalal started her cooking classes earlier than the film suggests. Also, her first cookbook was not self-published. Rather than being rejected by publishers, Dalal was approached by Vakil & Sons to write Pleasures of Vegetarian Cooking. However, the makers of Tarla don’t seem to be interested in either the reality of Dalal’s life or legacy. They want Tarla to fit their preferred template for women’s stories, which includes a supportive man and a woman being forced to choose between domestic bliss and professional success. (Ashwini Iyer Tiwari’s Panga (2020) and Nil Battey Sannata (2016) had similar arcs for the female protagonist, who returns to something she’s good at after marriage and motherhood force her to abandon it initially.)
With much of the drama packed into the film’s final act, the script falls back upon clichés. For instance, so long as Tarla is dreaming of making something of herself, she has the script’s sympathy. However, the moment she becomes successful, we’re shown how Tarla neglects her marriage and children — all because she’s intent upon excelling in her professional life. Neither she nor anyone else in her family notice one of her children has stopped eating. She expects her husband to cancel a much-needed job interview so that she can film an episode of her cooking show. To show the working woman as someone who verges on selfishness and neglects her home in order to excel at work is now a tired trope. It also feels particularly unfair when used in the context of a generation that proved by example that women could in fact do it all, even when the expectations were unrealistic.
Still, lazy and predictable narrative choices might have been acceptable if Tarla was a fun or engaging watch. Unfortunately, it is neither. With few memorable moments and little that’s worth savouring, Tarla is a film in desperate need of the cinematic equivalent of a tadka.