The only slightly credible feature involves some picture-postcard productionquality—neat roads, clean snow and a nice use of colours. Hindi films normally shotabroad ham production values, but they make up the lacunae by giving a warm treatment tothe show. Here the effect is kept remarkably free of even that quality—the backdropis superficial and complacent as would befit, you guessed it, a television series.
Tum Bin in many ways heralds the genre of the new tele-cine film. The story,despite beginning like a film, breaks down into the typical TV format. A guy atones the'crime' of killing a man (accidentally) by going to Canada and looking after hisfamily. There he mends the dead man's broken business—and the heart of hisbeloved. But whereas Hindi cinema would have taken you into moral dilemmas, here thenarration eschews melodrama to portray a laid-back flow of light sentiments. The maincharacters stay surprisingly deadpan throughout the movie—while this may beattributed to an entirely debutant cast, there seems to be a design behind the facade. Theuse of wooden faces fits in perfectly with the television sensibility—it also allowsthe director to actually make the movie like a music video.
But the problem is that however much you try, a movie is after all a movie—theeffects which work in a music video may start looking unnecessarily funny and out of placein cinematic form. The same goes for the dress sense—too much of Indian clothing inCanada, the use of strange tweed coats and salwaar kameez, take things close to theabsurd. The same goes for the music—the songs are surprisingly close to a musicalbum; they lack even the basic weight and mood associated normally with a Hindi film-typesetting. The song list includes numbers by Sonu Nigam, Taz (Stereo Nation), Jagjit Singhand Anuradha Paudwaal in a manner devoid of any sequential strain—there are ghazals,love songs, disco and pop numbers.
Tum Bin thus takes you one step closer to the dilution of the classical Hindifilm format—a trend which a movie like Lagaan had tried to reverse. The fact thatboth movies have come one after the other speaks a great deal about the ongoing churningin Bollywood.
