Gehraiyaan – Distract, Disrupt, Destroy

Gehraiyaan

The waves consume the lens gracefully. Swirling blue, dots of white, the roar of the Arabian Sea in your ears. It’s a great way to begin a film like Gehraiyaan, now that I think of it. Just like the sea from a distance, the film too feels placid. Churning in its depths, alas, is the kind of stuff that turns a sunny afternoon on the beach into a battering from a storm.

While sold as an ensemble cast film, Gehraiyaan is largely about Alisha [Deepika Padukone – Tamasha, Padmaavat], a thirty-something fitness trainer who lives with her partner of six years: Karan [Dhairya Karwa – Uri: The Surgical Strike, 83], a copywriter-turned-struggling novelist. Alisha’s life, already on a precipice, turns upside down when she embarks upon a relationship with her cousin Tia’s [Ananya Panday – Student of the Year 2, Pati Patni Aur Woh] fiancé Zain [Siddhant Chaturvedi – Gully Boy, Bunty Aur Babli 2].

Its four major characters afford Gehraiyaan a languidness that would seldom be excused of another film. That Shakun Batra is as comfortable here with brief glimpses of moments as he was with the incident-upon-incident narrative that drove his previous feature [Kapoor and Sons – Since 1921] only works to the film’s benefit.

The first hour passes by like a breeze, with the occasional gust of wind that barges into the frame. It’s not all setup, but a lot of what one might have perceived – going in – as big moments aren’t treated as such. Batra sure knows how to keep his audience engaged, knowing a large number of them have come in based on his smartly-cut trailer but he now has to keep them from averting their eyes (miles easier when your film is a straight-to-streaming release). He keeps things going by avoiding the larger denouements and moments, instead presenting them as elements of the film that are par for the course.

This keenness of swinging hard to port when confronted by the big moments shows itself early on: Alisha and Zain’s affair begins in complete contravention to the passionate (read hormonal) depiction of passionate mutual attractions, this one starts awkwardly, on a yoga mat in the middle of a studio, of all places. Similarly, Batra avoids the reveals one has to come to expect of such a tightly-wound narrative, where everything hinges on that one stray thing coming undone. Instead, we get the smaller moments – the phones that are silenced, the innocuous lies that are told, the contact names that are changed over and over again.

Gehraiyaan has a lived-in feel to it, though large portions take place in posh, spacious homes and offices whose accoutrements look fresh out of showrooms. In Alisha and Karan’s deteriorating relationship, there are brief moments of familiarity – they snipe at each other repeatedly as only a long-term couple would, but there is also an ease of intimacy about them. A goodnight kiss doesn’t necessarily lead to sex – neither of them considers the other’s body a novelty anymore, jokes come to them naturally, and what one seeks, the other inevitably can locate (as long as that is a physically-tangible quest).

The filmy moments come when Alisha and Zain start heading out to sea on his yacht and hook up in hotel rooms – snogging to Oaff and Savera’s sharp tunes, exploring anatomies with greater focus than either of them pays to their work. While the tension is palpable, and the chemistry between Padukone and Chaturvedi serviceable, it’s baffling as to why a director as good as Batra would want to rely on the much-abused musical montage to set the romance up. The film thus loses out on building an actual relationship between the two characters, and it has a crucial impact on how the second half unfolds.

Infidelity is messy, Batra seems to say over and over again, aided in his storytelling by the aching demands of modern-day technology. His characters can never really walk away from a situation – there are always phone calls to be answered, texts to be replied to. How far can you run, and how fast, is on you. How covert you manage to keep your Taj-based dalliances is again your headache, because somebody could’ve seen you coming / going. The smartphone has a key role to play throughout the film; in making it – as it is – an extension of his characters’ bodies, Batra manages to hide it in plain sight.

Layers come undone and questions are asked – what is emotional neglect if not a form of cheating, how much of lying and concealing in a relationship (not just in romantic ones, you realise right at the end) is acceptable, how do people stand to benefit – socially, financially, emotionally – from their relationships. This is the clincher for Gehraiyaan – it isn’t just Alisha who is hiding something; Zain is out playing with the sharks while trying to be one himself, Karan has little regard for the person he shares a life with, and Tia has a secret she has carried across the seven seas.

Since the first hour is spent quietly upending the expectations of his narrative, Batra must work briskly to power the film through to the finish line. That he does so by turning it into a domestic suspense thriller is what caught me off-guard. Surely the failure of a business is a plot point you can only stretch so far, I said. No, replied Batra, by having his characters invest in others not only physically and emotionally but also financially. It’s a carefully-designed card castle, propped up to come down at just the right time. That Batra’s timing is a little faulty is what brings Gehraiyaan very close to collapsing as a whole. Of course, the beginning of the end and when it occurs in the narrative is not all that’s messed up – Ananya Panday looks all at sea handling even the most basic of scenes: she can’t as much as say hello without it seeming off. On one level, it might seem that she is playing the character, but when every single line comes out the same way, and her face contorts itself into various non-expressions, one realises Batra has met his match. Both of his earlier films had non-actors in significant roles, but Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu made terrific use of Imran Khan’s limitations, and the better members of the ensemble lifted Sidharth Malhotra’s act in Kapoor and Sons. Too much in Gehraiyaan hinges on Panday, and she is just not able to get it together.

Abandoning one of your major players is another grave mistake – Dhairya Karwa is in fine form, playing Karan as an unbearably self-involved, unemployed adult who has no idea that actions or, in his case, inactions have consequences. He is the antithesis to Zain, which is why the film deserting him halfway through is baffling, even if narratively justifiable. It completely removes any tension the film has (which is also thanks to Karwa’s ease before the camera – he makes you care for Karan, unlike Ananya’s Tia).

Batra is more sure-footed when disrupting his narrative with editor Nitesh Bhatia – they hold back, teasing the audience repeatedly, only to show a different hand when it’s showtime. He plays with infidelity and cheating by jerking the chain – portraying it not just as a smooth-sailing romp but also as a type of relationship that puts people in tense situations that they just aren’t wired to deal with.

Actors of the calibre of Rajat Kapoor (Monsoon Wedding, Pari) and Naseeruddin Shah (Sparsh, Aiyaary) lend Gehraiyaan much needed heft. Equally, they are a testament to how performers can – in one scene (or with a line, in Naseer’s case) just win you over with their craft. The quiet force that is Kapoor’s Jitesh is offset by Shah’s worn-out Vinod. Each man is trying hard to get a young person in their life back on track in his own way. Kapoor has the more theatrical role of the two, and he’s chillingly good. But the sublimity of Shah is unmatchable (there’s little doubt that he’s the finest Hindi film actor of his generation). He plays Vinod (whose full name is Vinod Khanna, presumably a nod to the Osho commune by Shakun) with the tenderness and unflappability of a man who has just let life come at him. In the film’s finest scene, as the reassuring parent calming his child down, Shah is all too many things at once, and at ease being so.

Siddhant Chaturvedi is aptly cast as the determined Zain, and his sang-froid is put to great use by Batra. The unassuming façade that the actor adopts for most of the film is the perfect bait for an audience looking for interesting people on screen, and he is relatively solid throughout, though the material occasionally lets him down by not quite giving him more to smack around the park. Zain, as played by Chaturvedi, is shark and saviour, lover and lout, and the actor switches moods effortlessly.

Deepika Padukone is suitably complex, playing Alisha with anger and resentment that feels all too real. The arc of the character, however, is a bridge too far at times, and Padukone gets by through presence alone. The fragility of the situations Batra concocts lends frailty to Alisha, and it’s in the moments that the character comes undone that Padukone really comes through. She is an ace crier, and there is an intensity to her when needed. She starts to look haunted as the film hurtles towards the climax, all her hope extinguished,

Gehraiyaan’s main problem is that it tries to get too much out of the door – it is an electric mood piece (thanks to DP Kaushal Shah – 26/11 Mumbai Diaries, and the DI team), and the writing (Ayesha DeVitre Dhillon – Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, Kapoor and Sons; Sumit Roy – Zubaan, Yash Sahai, Batra) is effective (even if the dialogue – especially the swearing – sounds very stupid) but the two hours are so radically different from one another that they appear to be two different films. Each has its own merits (I preferred the latter hour) but the tables Batra tries turning have legs that need fixing. Desperately.

In trying to straddle two goals it sets for itself, Gehraiyaan ends up being neither here, nor there. It is, however, something bolder – visually and thematically – in a space of cinema that is rapidly dwindling with factory-line filmmaking having firmly entrenched itself as the order of the day.