Deepika Padukone Levi's ad accused of plagiarism by Yeh Ballet director Sooni Taraporevala

A new Levi’s video commercial featuring Bollywood actor Deepika Padukone has landed in an embarrassing situation. The video shows Deepika entering the sets and dancing to the tunes of “Auva-Auva”, the 1982 hit number sung by Bappi Lahiri and Usha Uthup. The video has already garnered over 5.6 million views on YouTube alone and the comment section is full of praise for the song as well as the Chhapaak actor. The controversy, however, concerns the set where Deepika is seen grooving on the song. Photographer and filmmaker Sooni Taraporevala on Tuesday claimed the set used in the video was extremely similar to the one she had created for her film Yeh Ballet. In a long Instagram post, with photographs of the set from her film and Levi’s advertisement, Taraporevala lambasted the makers of the set, calling it an “intellectual theft”. According to a report in ETimes, Rupin Suchak, who designed the set for Levi’s advertisement, has even acknowledged that the props and design were similar to the Yeh Ballet set. Responding to a tweet asking if the advertisement had been shot on the same set as Yeh Ballet, Suchak wrote, “Yes we did. In fact, that’s what our director wanted so we had to recreate that.” Taraporevala has shared a screenshot of the tweet with her note. She said it was brought to her attention that the set, which was built from the scratch and then dismantled after the shoot of her film, could be seen in the advertisement. “No such dance studio exists in Mumbai which is why we built it,” Taraporevala said. She further asked Levi’s and director Nadia Marquard Otzen would even think about copying the set and in the west “without permission/acknowledgement, and passing it off as their own creative work?” “Are you so creatively bankrupt? What were you thinking?,” the Yeh Ballet director wrote, adding the copycat culture in India needed to be called out and cancelled. Before ending her note, Taraporevala also clarified that her post and disapproval of plagiarism had nothing to do with Deepika Padukone or anyone else in the cast. Read the entire note here