'Gehraiyaan' Review: Flawed characters, dysfunctional relationships and a story of disintegration

Children, innocently and unconsciously, often end up giving lessons in profundity to the adults around them. Ironically, these very intuitive insights on life get pushed back in their own minds in the rough and tumble of growing up. Till divination dawns again determined by how things stack up. Shakun Batra’s Gehraiyaan is charted out intriguingly on this reiterative wheel with Alisha (Deepika Padukone) at its hub.

In the prelude young Alisha tells her troubled mother that one can always start all over again, even after a loss in the game of snakes and ladders, or in life. One can choose to give things another shot, believe in oneself, or keep brooding over the perceived tough luck.

With that context we meet her years later, as a yoga instructor in Mumbai trying to develop and seek funding for a new app. There are three other young and restless individuals in her company—her boyfriend and childhood buddy, a copywriter turned wannabe author Karan (Dhairya Karwa), her cousin Tia (Ananya Pandey) whom she had lost touch with for a long time and Tia’s fiancée, a real estate developer Zain (Siddhant Chaturvedi). Alisha is initially reluctant to go on a trip to Tia’s vacation home in Alibaug but relents on being persuaded by Karan. Heavens won’t fall in the two days out, he says. However, this is exactly how things turn out, the weekend transforms the tenuous web of relationships irrevocably.

As anticipated, Gehraiyaan is about illicit desires creeping up between Alisha and Zain. But more than that it’s about the brokenness within that they find fellowship in. Infidelity then is a mere manifestation of a deeper, shared disquiet. Both are kindred souls, weighed down by the burdens of the past, coarsened from the rancid relationships, nursing scars that refuse to heal.

Batra gets the beats of the growing attraction and the build up to the forbidden love right. The polite introductions and greetings, the matter-of-fact conversations leading on to the shared confidences, comfort of companionship and the furtive dalliances in various playgrounds—yoga classes, luxury yachts, the room in iconic Taj hotel, by the sea, on the beach, in the boardroom and the apartments.

It’s when the financial complications add to the already growing relationship snafus that the narrative starts becoming a mess within the neat circularity of its overall design and structure. Not for the many credible complications between Alisha and Zain but the way they clumsily pile on, on screen. The arguments and outbursts, conflicts and clashes, the betrayals and violence feel hastily handled making one hanker for pauses to be able to assimilate, react, and respond. It becomes like a tiring whirlpool and the persistent mediation of the rising waves comes across as too straightforward a metaphor to convey the game of passion.

It’s not just to do with the two lovers. Alisha’s relationship with Karan is portrayed in an offhand manner. The awkwardness and distance between her and Tia stems from complications that needed to be better elaborated. Tia’s side of the story gets almost obliterated, her relationship issues with Zain dismissed in perhaps just an odd sentence: “he has been quite out of it lately”. The big family secret is articulated in an astoundingly perfunctory and rushed way, its humongous implications on a naïve Tia herself barely dwelled on. Hard to imagine that it would have mattered to her so little as to state it pat to Alisha without even lifting an eyebrow and asking her to start afresh, in a blink of the eye. Add to it the fact that all the three young actors alongside Deepika feel more callow than compelling.

Perhaps these quibbles stare back hard because Batra has displayed a consistent felicity in presenting flawed individuals and slices of dysfunctional relationships. There has been an aesthetic cohesion in communicating chaos, an artistic stability in the way he represents disintegration. There’s a larger vision here too, despite the irritants, that saves Gehraiyaan from going banal.

So, it’s the mother-father-daughter arc that I found the most compelling. The legacy of feeling suffocated and stuck, passed on from the mother to the daughter. The things in life a woman wants to run away from, but how they catch up with her. The idea of getting away from a man for one’s own self than for another man. These two women and their anxieties and choices, women who want to break free and breathe and just be—these, for me, were the subjects of focus and empathy.

On the flip side is a man stuck in the “bura baap” (bad father) mould for life, a daughter having played mother to him when she was young, resenting him for not being a good dad to her even once. On top of it a loss and grief they have in common but couldn’t ever share, preferring to remain in a perpetual state of misunderstanding. And then the infinite wisdom of age and experience—to not destroy good memories with truth, to not run away from the past but let go of it and move on. It’s back a full circle from the prologue—about the question of luck versus choice. How we choose to deal with what life throws at us.

It’s a tingling triangle in which everyone is a casualty but not quite culpable and is made persuasive with the gravitas which a veteran like Naseeruddin Shah lends to the role of the father. And to it the fact that Deepika matches Shah with her poise, not just the physical self-possession but the assurance in conveying that crumbling feeling within. She made me long for the triumvirate of Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, and Jessie Buckley in The Lost Daughter. Deepika’s Alisha could have been the soul daughter of the mothers Leda and Nina in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut—refusing to be boxed in, defying expectations and role-playing and giving primacy to their own desires without feeling the accompanying guilt. But to achieve that Gehraiyaan needed to plumb higher depths.