Trigger warning: mentions of suicide.
The post also mentions spoilers from the movie.
A lot of what Shakun Batra does in his movies, in his own words, is ‘choreographing chaos’. All his movies echo chaos, Gehraiyaan is no different: it’s chaotic, turbulent, unrelieving.
My appetite & taste for chaos helped me navigate the movie better, even enjoy watching it.
The audience and critic reaction has been quite polarising about the movie but I absolutely enjoyed watching Gehraiyaan.
Batra’s 2 and a half-hour long journey begins with glimpses of the happy parts of the childhoods of Tia & Alisha, which last about 2 minutes. And that’s the only uncomplicated part of the movie.
Batra says, “We need to tell richer stories that explore love over different stages; more ‘Ijazat’s and ‘When Harry Met Sally’s,” and Gehraiyaan is that.
The People In The Movie, And In Batra’s World
Alisha and Karan. One is the house-runner; the ambitious woman who doesn’t ‘feel seen’ in her relationship, and if I may, in her life either. For she imagines and expects more out of it. The other is an aspiring novelist, who spends his time between drafts and looks frustrated with his relationship. Having left his high paying, soul-crushing job, he spends his time in an attempt to write a book and simultaneously somewhere also lives in the guilt of his partner running the house, but also expects her to do it because that’s what partners do?
It is a relationship of the mundane, of compromises, of courtesy and of two people who are on their own tracks, in different timezones, if I may. At least, what’s left of that relationship.
Zain and Tia. Tia, the so-nice daughter. Her parents had a difficult relationship, but that doesn’t seem to have changed her, on the surface, at least. Or maybe that’s why she’s trusts easily and is generally nice. Tia and Zain are a weird pair because you don’t see much of why they are together. Until the movie progresses and then it’s the only couple that actually makes sense to me.
Because if not the qualitative aspects of why they were drawn to each other, the transactional nature of their relationship is apparent – a nature often seen in relationships. Zain is ambitious, driven, unrelenting. Tia is, well, chill, supportive, and kind. But as my friend Akshara pointed out, “She is the one in charge and in control of the relationship and she exerts it in such a subtle way.”
Their Past, Present & Future – And What They Want From It
While the consensus is divided between the chemistry (or the lack of it) between Alisha and Zain, to me, them getting attracted to each other feels natural. He’s living or, at least, aspiring to live the life she wants for herself. That shared aspiration and history of trauma only pull them towards each other. Especially when they were already weighed down under the baggage of their respective relationships.
As Rahul Desai, in his absolutely wonderful review of the movie, puts it, “The struggle to be is often rooted in the battle to belong. Their compatibility is not driven by choice so much as the desperation to acquaint desire with destiny. Most of all, they are both victims and villains of their own fate.”
I also feel that all of this came together better because he did ‘notice her’ when she wasn’t feeling seen by her partner. Doesn’t that remind you of Shilpa Shetty and Shiney Ahuja in Life in a Metro or even Shahrukh and Rani’s relationship in Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna? That lack of self and identity in their respective relationship pivots Alisha and Zain’s relationship.
Shakun Batra’s Gehraaiyan gets two things right:
1. Suicidality
2. How intimate partner abuse looks like.No spoilers ahead.
Trigger Warning: elaboration on suicidal ideation and abuse.1/7
— Bijaya Biswal (@bijaya_biswal) February 13, 2022
It is a mechanism a lot of us temporarily resort to when things bog us down and become daunting: we enjoy and become territorial of this secrecy in a bid to carve our own space in life, especially when everything else seems closing in on them.
But, it caught up with them and the escape came to an end. As Alisha put it, “I don’t know how to let go of my reality“.
Eventually, to me, it felt like Alisha and Zain were trying to override their own realities by being together but, eventually, their truth caught up with them.
However, I still wish Zain was written better. While the movie has been made with a lot of sensitivity, I still found myself judging his actions. As Prathyush writes in his brilliant piece, “The writing for Zain is unable to give him the heft of guilt, burdening him instead with adulterous charm and an effortless penchant for lying. It’s all too neat to imply messiness.”
Zain’s death, in that sense, feels like a strange but sensible way to put an end to the vicious cycle his ambitions created for everyone around him. “Sometimes, a character messes up the story so much, knots the strands of morality so thoroughly, that the only way to get the story back on the steady ground is to dispense with him. Death certainly softens the character’s flaws — in life as in art, he adds.
Batra’s Stories Of ‘Reluctant Familyhood’ ft Indian Families
Tia and Alisha are cousins, with a tangled past between their families. But what starts unfolding gradually is how their individual pasts also influence their actions. Alisha lost her mother to suicide, and she deals with the consequences of the event as a daughter. It’s also mentioned how Tia’s parents had a tumultuous relationship with her father cheating on her mother. A lot of what Alisha does is subconsciously influenced and determined by the tragedies of her past.
The movie also created buzz given its portrayal of infidelity and was seen as trying to rationalise or glorify it.
However, for me, the movie is hardly about infidelity. It is about the greatest fear of this generation: not wanting to become their parents, in which Alisha takes precedence.
She does everything with the awareness and fear of not becoming her mother, not realising that the shadows are catching up with her every step of her life. She mourns the loss of a role model in her father and the loss of a parent in her mother.
But the way Deepika portrayed Alisha, makes you feel that she’s genuinely so, so stuck, helpless, and it made me want to reach out and do something. And that was a major win for both Batra and Deepika.
It gets etched in stone and comes to a poetic full circle when she realises the truth about the unfaithfulness in her parents’ relationship. I do not mean to romanticise the development, but the fact that Alisha betrays her own cousin through her relationship with Tia’s romantic partner feels like a poetic repetition of the events that began the tryst with her own tumultuous past.
For someone with the history and childhood I do, the movie hit a raw nerve, as I’m sure it must have, for a lot of young Indians. It’s a fear that’s left me sleepless, influenced my decisions and, at times, made me feel stuck as a hotbed of emotional mess.
But Not All’s Well In Gehraiyaan
At the very least, the movie should also have had trigger warnings. Not just the scenes depicting suicide, but the whole movie premises itself on the traumatic reality of many Indians. A good heads up is always comforting and evokes a sense of trust in the viewer, also making them feel seen, their fears acknowledged.
“If you’re mature enough to write a story about difficult things, you should also have the compassion to let others know what you’re going to be depicting. Trigger warnings are not a thing of the past, they need to be normalised,” Akshara tells me.
And you’d expect it to be normalised in a movie that humanises the not-so-‘white’ parts of people. “If you don’t give trigger warnings, it can appear as though you’re comfortable using tragic things as plot points, and not real actual events that have consequences,” she adds.
I also felt the sex scenes were, simply put, unreal. They seemed awkward and even hushed at a few places. For instance, their first kiss just didn’t feel right when it happened.
It seemed like the director was pitching hard for the sexual tension between Alisha and Zain; this seemed weirder because Gehraiyaan had an ‘intimacy coach, coordinator and director’ on sets, something unheard of in most movies.
The rush seemed strange to me, given the film stretches to a fairly lengthy two and a half hours. Or maybe it was the drive to fit as many subplots and developments in the movie as the filmmakers could. Either way, hunger to show more is no substitute for succeeding at it.
The film’s writing also felt unfair to a character or two. Throughout the movie, I couldn’t stop thinking of This is Us. That show is proof that brilliant, inclusive, sensitive storytelling is possible for all characters; and in Gehraiyaan, you see that missing for Karan. Even though Tia did get fair character development, as an audience, I’d have loved more insight into his personality because Ananya Pandey is a discovery in the film!
The Film’s Ambition Is Applaudable
What Shakun Batra has managed to do is a great job. We don’t see films like this that dare to tell difficult, multi-dimensional stories.
The movie makes you uncomfortable like Shakun Batra usually does. But it’s real. And that constant tension between uncomfortable and real is chaotic, but it’s what kept me hooked to the movie.
You don’t see Indian filmmakers managing to find that sensitivity AND sensibility to make a good movie, with hardly any emotional flaws. “I can’t believe that an Indian man has written women like this because Alisha and Tia are very nicely written,” Akshara shares with me.
The movie is gentle in its advice and resilient in its storytelling. “All I want is to take audiences to a place where they see these characters as normal human beings, preferably themselves,” Batra had said, once, in an interview. And I think he does a damn pretty good job at it in this movie.
Despite the harsh criticism from some factions, I think the movie opens a new door for Indian storytelling.
It is a story ridden with complexities that needed to be told. “There is this naïve belief that if a film is depicting a complex story, the film must be complex too. But sometimes it merely aspires for it… That does not mean we should cordon it off, ramming it into the ground by burying it under acidic adjectives and sour adverbs,” Prathyush writes.
As an avid and invested lover of Indian cinema, I’m excited about what comes next. It’s really assuring that somebody, somewhere understands what translating that sensitivity on screen might be like. It’s a real thing to be comforted about, especially for young Indians.
Gehraiyaan is the start of more movies that will be willing to explore bolder, more courageous, even if messy, storytelling.