Here’s the latest cautionary tale about the big bad ways of showbiz that plays out a lot like those cautionary tales about the big bad ways of showbiz.
Writer-director Sai Kabir’s Tiku weds Sheru pads up a familiar saga of film industry hustle with an unlikely romance and a con game that goes awry. The dynamics of the marriage between Sheru (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) and Tiku (Avneet Kaur) survives the film’s wayward plotting, uneven humour and poorly sketched secondary characters.
Shiraz likes to be known as Sheru. Tasneem’s preferred moniker is Tiku. These souls with eyes bigger than their stomachs are both pursuing dreams they can’t afford, and are fooling themselves and each other.
Sheru isn’t a film financer but an extra – the kind you see in the background of scenes, indistinguishable from the props. Tiku too has her secrets, which she reveals to Sheru a bit too late. Sheru – fond of bragging about his non-existent lineage, always pretending to be who he isn’t, a huckster living on borrowed money – turns out to be the perfect match for Tiku.
The early portions of the 111-minute film, which suggest that Sheru and Tiku have fallen hard for their own deceptions, are stronger than whatever follows. The Madhur Bhandarkar lite film has an array of characters, from pimps and gangsters to crooked politicians and drug dealers. The later sections have an ad hoc quality that strain credibility.
he only differentiating factor – and one of the movie’s redeeming qualities – is the lack of judgement of the choices that Tiku, in particular, is forced to make.
Despite the obvious age gap between Sheru and Tiku (the actors are separated by 21 years in real life), Siddiqui and Kaur have a tender, infectious chemistry that helps overcome the ickiness of their May-December romance. If Siddiqui nails Sheru’s humbug ways and touching dignity in the face of repeated humiliation, Kaur is consistently credible as the ingenue forced into a version of hell.
“We’re singing the same page,” Tiku tells Sheru. The leads lend a cartoonish saga with an undertow of sadness a well-judged mixture of toughness and vulnerability.