High on Tamasha, low on real soul

The trailer of Tamasha is out — and it shows Ranbir Kapoor and Deepika Padukone as two souls in search of that thing called love.

Ranbir plays Ved (wait, that may not be his real name), on a holiday of self-discovery in Corsica, where he meets Mona… Mona Darling. That’s Deepika, trying hard to be bindaas. And that’s definitely not her name. So who are they? Throughout the trailer we see them enacting various roles that give away nothing about their identity — except that they are people in search of an identity. There are scenes on stage depicting elaborate costume dramas. Then there are moments of introspective flagellation when the couple looks each other in the eye and asks that radical question, ‘Who are you?’ — when the person asking that question actually means to ask, ‘Who am I?’

A.R. Rahman’s music — and there is plenty of it in the trailer — plays up the theme of lost identity. Tamasha comes across as an unduly complex psychological drama, underlined by bouts of self-doubt that make Imtiaz Ali’s cinema seem more densely layered than it actually is.

Tamasha also seems like a throwback to Ayan Mukerjee’s Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani. And that’s not a good thing. Ranbir again plays a self-absorbed jerk who beautiful women find irresistible for some reason. At the end of the trailer, he has a typical “Ranbir moment” when he looks with contempt and pity at Deepika’s lovelorn face and says, “You’ve fallen in love… with someone else.” Oh dear.

Deepika handles the emotionally charged moments with anguished grace. But when she is shown having fun with Ranbir in Corsica, it comes across as fake. Deepika is not a naturally gregarious girl, so when she plays bindaas, gets high and dangles a bottle of beer in her fingers, she comes across more like a Meerabai on a bad-hair day. At one point she abuses an uncomprehending French man in Hindi. The abuses are all vegetarian. Censor chacha is watching, you know!

So, how will the audience react to Tamasha when it opens on November 27? For now, that’s hard to say indeed.