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Tarla movie review: Where’s the food in Huma Qureshi-starrer about India’s kitchen queen?
Tarla movie review: Huma Qureshi as Tarla Dalal is efficient and pleasant but never quite as flavourful as we would have liked her to be.

The biopic of the iconic home chef who saved many a crumbling kitchen around the world with her veg-cooking-made-simple, doesn’t have the one element all films revolving around food: not one memorable scene in which the camera lingers lovingly over a dish, making us sniff the aroma, feel the texture, and making us wish that we were eating that very same thing, right here, right now.
This is one of the biggest misses in Tarla, a straight-forward film about a young woman who is married off at a young age, and told like so many Indian girls used to be — ‘jo man mein aaye shaadi ke baad kar lena’ (do what you feel like after you get married). When Nalin Dalal (Sharib Hashmi) comes to ‘see’ her, Tarla (Huma Qureshi) is annoyed enough to serve him halwa laced with red pepper. But he turns out to be a sport, and soon we see them settling into domesticity — him going off to the factory with his tiffin, and her cooking, cleaning, taking care of their three kids. This looks as if it’s going to be her life, till she discovers, quite by accident, that she has a knack of transferring her skills at the stove to other young women, all about to get married.
The two-hour film is saved from being a drag with Hashmi’s terrific turn as a traditional home-grown husband who thinks he is being progressive, but who expects to be acknowledged and thanked at every turn. Qureshi as Tarla is efficient and pleasant but never quite as flavourful as we would have liked her to be. And this makes the film even more by-the-numbers than it should have been.
The connection that the film makes between Tarla’s own story and the agency that women should have to carve their own paths is a good thing, but the obvious ways in which this fact is hammered in becomes tiresome. Nalin, or Nallu as Tarla calls him lovingly, gets to lecture his wife on how she left a sick child home to go off and shoot her TV show pilot: if the film had really been on her side, she wouldn’t have been painted as the bad guy for so long. Of course, he has a change of heart, and that comes in a speech in which he hands all credit to Tarla, but only after the film has had enough time to wag a finger at the central character.
And that brings me back to my original grouse: where, oh where, is the food? All the glorious food, which Tarla Dalal’s recipes made so easy to cook?
Tarla movie director: Piyush Gupta
Tarla movie cast: Huma Qureshi, Sharib Hashmi, Bharti Achrekar, Veenah Nair
Tarla movie star rating: 2 stars
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