8x10 Tasveer Movie Review: A Tale Marred by Cliched Ending

Nagesh Kuknoor takes on the thriller genre with 8x10 Tasveer and does a pretty neat job of it for the most part. Till well past the interval, there is little one can find to quibble with the director and his film, but somewhere close to the end, the twist that he adds, seems a little too filmy, as if he had run out of any fresh ideas. It is a twist all right, but seems a little cliched. As for the rest of the film, Kuknoor manages to build up the suspense slowly and surely and the film turns out to be pretty absorbing.

The film is about the story of a forest officer called Jai (Akshay Kumar), who is estranged from his father (Benjamin Gilani), who he loves very much. The feeling is mutual despite both men holding very different views on life. Jai has a gift of being able to get into the immediate past of a person by looking at their picture. This is a gift which often has people coming to him for help to find a missing loved one. But after his father's death, Jai is visited by strange dreams of his father asking him to help. He keeps finding himself drawn to his paternal house, where the last picture of his father, taken just moments before his accidental death, hangs on the wall. According to his father's will, all the property has been left to his mother (Sharmila Tagore), who tells him that his father wanted to leave it to the organization which Jai worked for. His father died in a freak accident aboard his ship, fell into the water and died of a heart attack. All this was just before he was going to sign the agreement. The other people on board the ship when the accident occurred included Jai's mother, his cousin (Rushad Rana), his uncle (Anant Mahadevan) and his father's friend and lawyer (Girish Karnad). Jai uses his special gift and goes back in time to that fateful hour on the boat with the help of the picture and sees the scene being played out before him. He also meets a former police detective, Pasha (Javed Jaffrey) who suffers from an obsessive compulsive disorder and his suspicions about his father's death being a murder and not an accident get further confirmed. All of them on board, including his mother, come under his scanner. But each time that he uses the picture to get back in time, it poses an even greater danger to his own life and he even lands up in hospital a couple of times. At his girlfreind's (Ayesha Takia) plea, he agrees to give matters a rest and let go. But when someone in a car tries to run him down, he is back on the job of finding his father's killer, with the help of Pasha. As he closes in on the truth, the danger to his life seems immense.

Akshay Kumar delivers a very controlled, low key, yet intense performance in the lead role. He executes quite a few action scenes and does them with his usual elan. Ayesha Takia does not have much do but handles the twist in her character quite well. Sharmila Tagore as the mother is her usual graceful self. However, what does seem a sheer waste of talent is the presence of actors like Benjamin Gilani, Girish Karnad and Anant Mahadevan, who have really nothing much to do. Of course, their presence, probably does add value to the film. Javed Jaffrey puts in a very good performance as Pasha, the detective, with his Hyderabadi Hindi in Canada. He really manages to make every role his own, a quality of all great and good actors.

What takes the movie forward is really the story, which is the film's strength. Kuknoor tells his story very well too but he resorts to certain cliches, which helps only in undoing all the good work that he has done in the beginning of the movie. What began as a low key, drama, actually becomes like almost any other masala Hindi film in the last bit of the movie. Tec hnically, of course, one cannot fault Kuknoor. The cinematography is quite excellent, with Vikas Sivaraman's camera capturing the locales of Canada and South Africa beautifully. There is little scope for music in a thriller and so it is with this film as well. But it has a good background score and the couple of songs used in the film are quite good as well, thanks to composers Salim Suliaman.

8x10 Tasveer had everything going for it, except for the last bit of the movie, when the real culprit is revealed. The twist at the fag end of this tale just doesn't ring true and spoils all of the good work that Kuknoor does in laying out the premise the manner in which he dresses up his tale with just the right actors, ambience etc. But he fumbles with the most crucial bit of a thriller and loses his audience.