Tandav review: Amazon Prime Video’s refried political samosa with Saif Ali Khan, Dimple Kapadia

In this review of Tandav, Amazon Prime Video's latest offering, let's check out if the web series has lived up to the expectations.

‘Politics has made me do many bad things,’ Devki Nandan (Tigmanshu Dhulia) says, ‘But if this man comes to power, he will not just divide, but break everything.’ Fresh out of a news cycle where the American President has been impeached again, and our country has been divided by ideologies for a while now, this series promises more politics. Is it going to be predictable, I wonder, but Saif Ali Khan has mastered his small screen presence rather well, so I dive in.

Three episodes later, I’m wondering why things have not changed at all.

AR Rahman is still dishing out refried music from Mani Ratnam’s Yuva and that movie showed up on the big screen way back in 2004. And, the student politics haven’t changed at all. You’d have to be living under some rock to have not heard students and police clashing over ‘Aazaadi!’ and ‘We want justice!’

Saif Ali Khan fits the part so well, you believe him when he says, "We are all responsible for the state of students and student politics." His tactics with Shiva Shekhar are practically brilliant. If you have seen how students (and then ordinary people) were chanting aloud the preamble to the Indian Constitution, then you would know how it feels to be a part of a movement that makes you feel alive.

The student characters are beautifully crafted, and yet the ordinary encounters with the police and their infighting makes the whole experience rather predictable. In fact, I wished Rajinikanth would suddenly appear as a hostel warden as he did in Petta and saved the in- fighting among the students.

Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub is earnest and, in his practically hundredth performance as the underdog who becomes champion, he manages to convince us that he’s a chap from Bihar who only wants to pass the UPSC exams. But, Saif is there to tell him that there are two types of people, one who picks up the phone and does what is told, and the other picks up the phone and tells people what to do.

There are gems like this peppered throughout the series. But does everyone have the bandwidth to see the show without hitting the forward by ten seconds?

Dimple Kapadia wears the most exquisite sarees and looks so good that one is awed by her acting chops too. She lights up every scene, whether it is to look stricken at her lover’s funeral or when she makes a late night visit to Devki Niwas to quietly threaten Saif Ali Khan and his wife. And when she comments about how men are not used to taking orders from a woman, especially in politics, she’s awesome.

Gauhar Khan (oh so gorgeous!) as Maithili Sharan, Dimple Kapadia’s right hand girl is a great supporting character. But the scene where the anonymous tip demands a hundred crore and she has to walk to the bin to retrieve information is so trite and so predictable you want to just curl up and switch to something else.

Even though the switch from ‘no politics’ to ‘yes, politics!’ for Shiva and Samar Pratap Singh is well done and dramatised, you wish there was some respite from the predictability. I always wonder why student leaders fall for the ‘Desh ko tumhari zaroorat hai’ line.

Saif Ali Khan can swear very easily even though he looks like he plays the piano and would rather eat pate rather than pav vada. His father’s right-hand man who then becomes his right-hand man, Gurpal Chauhan, is the best thing to happen to the series. Sunil Grover is often underestimated as a comic actor, but the creepy glasses help make him the ‘gira’ hua aadmi. The safari suit and the little ‘X-Ray’ information tip about how Sunil Grover spent hours with the cat to shoot the scene helped too.

Gurpal Chauhan, played by Sunil Grover who is often underestimated as a comic actor, is the best thing to happen to the series.

Characters like Gurpal Chauhan exist everywhere. The enablers to all corruption. They operate in the grey areas, so when he says that there’s a fine line between sahi kaam and galat kaam, and that’s politics; that’s what I am, that’s what I do.

The little segue with Kailash Kumar (Anup Soni) and professor Sandhya Nigam the brilliant Sandhya Mridul is interesting, but they end it in a really tedious way. I wish they had thought up some path-breaking, ‘This is not a scandal, I love this woman’ instead of the same ole ‘Political leader is having an affair with the professor’... Such stories are being played out right now in politics and it’s a shame that women are often treated as tropes instead of creating something new, something different.

The supporting cast is excellent starting with the students on the Vivekananda University campus to the political leaders like Kumud Mishra who plays the veteran Gopal Das Munshi who in his own words says, ‘I never became PM, but have made three Prime Ministers leave their posts…’

Tandav is an interesting enough show with a star cast that is mind blowingly wonderful. But the material they are dealing with is gilt, not gold. I watched it so you will not jump in with great expectations.