When director Anubhav Sinha (Dus , Tum Bin) went to work on Tathastu, I’m sure his intentions were honest. The cast includes such notable names as Sanjay Dutt , Amisha and Jaya Prada. Yet, for all of those good intentions, Tathastu turns out to be hopelessly mediocre - a poorly scripted, preachy fable that forgets about unfolding a coherent, believable story in its zeal to spread propaganda.
Tathastu’s underlying concept has a great deal of relevance in today’s world, where the term medical coverage is rarely mentioned without an accompanying, profane adjective. Yet Anubhav and his writer take this important issue and make it the fulcrum of a story that is divorced from reality by so many contrivances that it’s almost laughable.That’s not all - we also get loads of corny dialogue and several pointless subplots.Like a sequence involving a politician is just a gap filler.
There are times when acting almost redeems this movie - almost, but not quite. Sanjay is convincing as a desperate father who has run out of legal options and can think of no other alternative but to point a gun and hope no one calls his bluff. Anoop Soni has no trouble playing a veteran cop who probably loves the smell of napalm in the morning. Darshan Jariwala offers an effective turn as a doctor caught between his oath and the system. Solid support is provided by Amisha as Sanju’s supportive wife and Yash Pathak as his dying son.
Aside from the sheer implausibility of the principal action, the film’s most glaring weakness lies in its inability to state its case with any degree of subtlety. People, even those who agree with the political doctrine being espoused, don’t like sermons. And that’s precisely what Tathastu turns into - a two-hour attempt to indoctrinate viewers into believing that the current health care system is in desperate need of reform
The movie isn’t content to show the inadequacies of the system - it talks about them endlessly in speeches that would have been at home in a public service announcement. Not only is this tedious, it’s unnecessary - the events happening to Sanjay are sufficient to illustrate the situation.
At its heart, Tathastu is a drama, but the movie frames several sections as action sequences, complete with artificially generated tension. There’s a scene in which a cop climbs through the hospital’s air conditioning ducts in order to get a shot at Sanjay.This is handled so badly like something in a direct-to-cable B-movie thriller that I found myself cringing.
Sadly, that’s the way I reacted to much of this movie - a good idea with noble intentions gone awry because of a poorly crafted screenplay and uneven direction. Next time Anubhav Sinha wants to tell a deeply personal story, he should rely on something that is less obviously manufactured by a connect-the-dots screenwriter.