From 2007 to 2010, the establishing years of her career, the persistent take away from most of Deepika’s performance was that she was beautiful, but not really cut out for serious dramatic acting. The reactions to her debut film Om Shanti Om, went like this. Rajeev Masand wrote, “a dazzling debut by Deepika Padukone who’s packaged like the next big thing,” but Raja Sen was critical when he conveyed, “She is used sparingly and constantly camouflaged, either by a situation which requires acting incompetence, deftly digitalised song sequences or a complete lack of fabric in the second half. I’m not claiming the ‘find of the year’ can’t act; it’s just that this film doesn’t require her to.”
Everyone who saw her exclaimed that she was mesmerizing, but the visual allure was all that was catching on. Nikhat Kazmi, while commenting on her role in Bachna Ae Haseeno (2008) said, “Deepika who’s delightful too as the uber feminine feminist. Only, you wish there was more of her.” Not just that, critics in the West were equally enchanted with her screen presence and charisma. Reviewing Chandni Chowk to China (2009), American film critic James Berardinelli of Reel Reviews wrote, “Deepika Padukone, a supermodel-turned-actress, is impossibly gorgeous, joining Aishwarya Rai and Freida Pinto as Indian beauties whose screen appearances provide them with worldwide notice.”
Some would say being compared to Aishwarya Rai Bachchan is a compliment in itself, but the critical reception wasn’t ready to cut any slack when it came to assessing her performances. Raja Sen, while appraising her efforts on Love Aaj Kal (2009) wrote, “I would here like to offer Farah Khan a special and awestruck citation for making us believe Deepika Padukone is an actress. She cannily used the undisputably attractive girl as a lovely mannequin in Om Shanti Om, and none of us realised just how plastic this Barbie really is. She has a great smile, dimples and all, but that’s really it. I feel for Imtiaz to see his dialogue butchered by his heroine, heartbreak heightening when she murders a lovely ‘break me’ line. Both Imtiaz’s earlier films featured heroines of tremendous talent, and one wishes this one also had an actual actress.” Similar sentiments were echoed, albeit with subtlety, by Indian Express critic Shubhra Gupta as she wrote, “You wonder if the outcome would have been different if he had paired himself (‘Love Aaj Kal’ is Saif’s first home production) with another actress. Deepika is far too put together to display naked emotion.”
That was the war of attrition. There were a host of film critics and fans who believed that Deepika’s aphroditic talents were enough to merit her place as an A-list actor. But for every believer there was also a naysayer, who in all fairness, were reacting to the ‘uncertainty’ that Deepika acknowledged in her Filmfare interview. Remarkably, Deepika was keeping a level head and her choices of film and filmmakers were testimony to the fact that she wanted to do better. Working with Imtiaz Ali, Pradeep Sarkar, Ashutosh Gowariker and Prakash Jha, she was selecting the connoisseurs of meaningful cinema to make her mark. But even when she put an earnest foot forward in Jha’s Aarakshan (2011), she was met with such rhetoric as Baradwaj Rangan’s appraisal that stated, ‘Deepika Padukone, who speaks with the studied earnestness of a little girl in a school play who’s spent a lot of time memorizing her lines and is terrified of forgetting them.’