Namrata Joshi's is perhaps the best review of all those panning Tashan: unlike most of her peers,she has an eye for the film's "smugness", that is to say itsself-conscious nod to its masala roots, and is surely right when she saysdirector Vijay Krishna Acharya has a tendency to lull the writer in him into adeep sleep (to her credit; most other reviewers have trashed the film on thesame grounds--a wafer-thin plot; implausible characterization; poor dialogue--that don't seem to give them pause where other films are concerned (contrastthe generally favorable reviews a farce like Race received), suggestingthat something other than the film's thin storyline might have ticked them off.As for what that might be, and why and how there's a lot more at work in Tashanthan Ms. Joshi has given it credit for, the answer lies in Kanpur--not somuch the real-life industrial city that has seen better days, but the Kanpur of(Acharya's) imagination, a city "representative" of the heartland, andof a state of mind that might seem anachronistic in contemporary Hindi cinema.