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.