If you want to be disappointed, there are better movies to be disappointed by.

This is a half-star picture with one extra star for how ignorant it is about its own quality.

This movie is a perfect example of a city-bred director scanning our heartlands, and instead of taking in all the complexity, all the denseness, stopping to ask himself, “What are the corrections I can highlight in these lives, and how do I stitch together a narrative around these corrections?”

Very briefly, we see an honest film and some three-dimensional characters. The dread in Imtiaz Ali’s Tamasha feels real. The silliness, however, comes across as too orchestrated.

In its misappropriation of Freudian themes, the movie gives its protagonist a truckload of guilt, but nothing more to chew on. And all this, means that the grand statement made isn’t anything more than a South Mumbai kid’s version of the all-conquering, all-observing, all-knowing feminine power.

There’s a lot of worship for women that’s comes through in X. But is there enough love?