By Malay Desai
By: McCann Delhi
Starring Deepika Padukone, Farhan Akhtar and their character’s ‘friend’ each, the new ‘Open Happiness’ series spot is placed in rural India. After a pretty girl and her friend fail to catch their bus to the examination centre, she fears that she’ll now have to be at home peeling pea-pods all her life thanks to her father. This is when a nearby cycle-rickshaw wala downs a Coke and springs into action, promising to overtake the bus. Handing over the bottle to her at the back, he whirls away and eventually screeches to a halt, right in front of the bus at the exam hall. ‘I’ll never let you peel peapods’, he announces, as the girls smile away, followed by the signature product window.
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‘Dhur burbag, chauthi phail,’ ‘Ee phinger kitna hai?’ ‘Baap kitne hai tohre?’ – lines mouthed by Aamir Khan from a 2003 campaign don’t need YouTube-ing, they are entrenched in the minds of all who watched the telly that World Cup year. The films with their Anglo-Bihari laced with Hindi, redefined the ‘price promo’ concept… and 11 summers later, the same agency produces this.
Chhota Coke is now double the price, Deepika Padukone is the hottest property but a non-Aamir ad requires a Farhan Akhtar too, who’s riding high with recent awards and a film release. This isn’t a price promo though, it’s the latest milestone in a happy-shiny route adopted globally by Coke, and the two new faces are presumably the beginning of a series of films.
Let’s call the concept hinterland funk – to create cool-ish characters coming from the rural belt and win over the chunk of the cola market as also give the metro slickers something exotic to chuckle about. It’s a trend that keeps hitting Bollywood and subsequently ad films, and if you’ve loved the simpleton boy Dhanush from Raanjhanaa who also rides a cycle-rickshaw, you’ll see where this spot is coming from. Akhtar does well in his gaon-thi expressions, so does Padukone in her desi ‘thenk-yoo’.
That said, we were waiting for a twist, a conflict or at least a punch line in this one, but the spot got over too fast. There was none of the above in the 45-seconder, making us go ‘Okay, so?’ in the end. Fine, Deepika’s pretty to look at but it’s not a Katrina ad, you know what we mean? We hope there’s a longer version of this, or more in the series before ‘Pepsi IPL’ takes over public consciousness.
The memorable spots of last decade were directed by Ashutosh Gowariker, and his touch was evident with casting of Lagaan characters. This film is the handiwork of Anurag Kashyap, who too happens to be on the right side of his success curve but that doesn’t show in this spot at all. In fact, we also spotted a line which doesn’t sync with Akhtar’s lips.
‘Abbe dantmanjan, kaa badmaasi hai, hain?’
(To watch Coke’s film, go to bit.ly/March3 ad )
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