Anil Sharma who was all for gritted teeth and clenched fists in Gadar, goes incurably lachrymose in his new film Vanvaas. Set in the saffron splendour of Varanasi, Sharma’s cinema is an old-fashioned weepie with a bleeding heart and visuals that exude an over-saturated emotional meltdown in fits and starts.

It is a familiar tale often told since Shakespeare’s King Lear, of ungrateful children, this time abandoning their father to die in Varanasi. But these progenies from hell are substantially more wretched, less interesting in their toxicity, than their counterparts in the past including the Bachchan bunch in Ravi Chopra’s Baghban.

Nana Patekar plays Tyagi, the dementia-riddled patriarch who spends all his time day dreaming about his dead wife. After being abandoned by his children and their wives in Varanasi (to the sound a clamorous Bhajan), Tyagi who suffers from what seems to be advanced dementia, befriends a mischievous tourist volunteer.