Tamasha (2015)

Before I watched the movie, I was all set to open this review with a snarky comment about the trailer’s “why always the same story?” tagline. Because YJHD made buckets of money and boy does the press get a lot of mileage out of promos with Deepika and Ranbir, that’s why. But it’s actually kind of a weird movie. Our protagonist, Ved, is a boy obsessed with story. He seeks it out, learns of its universality, and tries to make his life one as well. He (Ranbir Kapoor) meets Tara (Deepika Padukone) on vacation in Corsica, and Ved thinks it would be a great story to go a bit nutty together and make up lies about themselves so they live it up for a week, promising never to see each other again.

But Tara can’t forget, and tracks Ved down. They get together, but it turns out in real life, Ved is kind of boring. And I’m not sure if I’m supposed to read the contrast of Ved’s emotional flatness as if from Tara’s perspective, or if Ranbir is just really phoning it in. Pretty sure it’s the latter. It’s pretty much like he’s playing an entirely different character.

She tries, but when he proposes, she can’t help but tell him that he isn’t the same person she fell in love with in Corsica.

And not only that, but she thinks that really, inside, he’s wild and creative and fun. And what do you do when you’re told that the boring, real you isn’t good enough?

Tara regrets what she said, and desperately tries to get him back. Even boring Ved is better than none at all, but he’s not having it. And it’s nice to see him pull out some sarcasm after his interminable mildness of the previous part of the movie, but it’s Deepika that really sells the scene.

After that, Ved does, in fact, let his emotions out, gets fired from his boring job, sheds his Beard of Discontent, and searches for his true self.

By the end of the movie, he’s found his calling creating stage shows with dance and story, and has grown a Man-Bun of Personal Fulfillment.

So Ved has a full circle narrative, and Tara gets nothing at all, but she seems perfectly happy with that. I am less so, because the ratio of “what each actor is given to work with” to “what the actor does with it” is so firmly in Deepika’s favor.