Udta Punjab takes us on a high

No sarson fields carpeted in lush yellow; no men in colourful turbans and women in multi-coloured salwar-kameez doing the Bhangra.

The trailer for Udta Punjab shows us a Punjab we’ve never seen before. Welcome to the land of junkies. Someone with a thick bucolic accent tells us at the beginning of the tumultuous trailer that 70 per cent of Punjab is into drugs and if we don’t watch it, Punjab will soon become another Mexico.

We see Shahid Kapoor as Tommy Singh, the  hooch-addicts’ rock-star avatar, writhing on the bathroom floor in drugged ecstasy. In comparison to Tommy Singh’s antics in Udta Punjab, Shahid’s Kaminey avatar was a Walt Disney cartoon figure. Tommy is seriously malfunctioned. He is a raving, screaming, snorting, drugged, demented, hedonist. While the cops wait to arrest him, he comes out of the bedroom screaming profanities while a girl watching the scene topples off her chair in amusement.

Shahid also gets walloped and abused in police lock-up by Diljit Dosanjh who accuses him of ruining the youth of Punjab. Then there is Alia Bhatt, hockey stick in hand, sporting what sounds like a Bihari accent, a little too thick to be convincing. But full marks to her for attempting to play someone so alien to her personality.

The trailer of Udta Punjab is helmed by a hallucinatory heft. It spins forward in a stream of disjointed visuals and dialogues indicating the drugged state of a nation hell-bent on damnation. It would be interesting to see how director Abhishek Choubey brings the four principal characters together… or whether they come together at all.

Kareena Kapoor playing a doctor is the one positive character. She looks particularly angelic among the others. “All the men are injected and zonked out. It’s up to the ladies to do something,” Dosanjh playing the drug-busting cop tells Kareena Kapoor.