Gehraaiyan review: A beautifully calibrated relationship drama

Siddhant Chaturvedi and Deepika Padukone in Shakun Batra's 'Gehraiyaan'.

Watching Shakun Batra’s new film Gehraiyaan reminded me of a line in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. Marriage Story is a talky film; talk is the primary driver of its action—a divorce and the immediate lead-up to it. The character Scarlet Johansson plays, the wife, says ruefully in one of the film’s long monologues: “It’s not as simple as not being in love anymore” —it’s a realisation that long-time couples and protagonists Alisha (Deepika Padukone) and Karan (Dhairya Karwa), and Zain (Siddhant Chaturvedi) and Tia (Ananya Pandey) of Gehraiyaan are trying to grapple with, perhaps change or break out of, even if fleetingly. Like Baumbach’s award-winning film, Gehraiyaan is also talky without being loud or grating.

Gehraiyaan is Batra’s most mature film, a relationship drama about the elusive nature of love, the ineffable spark at its core and the realm of practicalities which often defines and limits love.

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We meet Alisha, a resolute yoga instructor looking for money to jumpstart her career by creating an app that corrects yoga postures. By the end of the very first scene we know Alisha is struggling—financially as well as emotionally. She is in an imploding relationship with her long-time boyfriend Karan who is in pain himself, trying to finish a novel after abandoning a “soul-killing” advertising job. The set-up for a relationship in its death throes is economical and eloquent. They go on a trip to a bungalow in Alibagh with Tia, Alisha’s cousin, who is also Karan’s old friend. The journey is on a swank yacht that Tia’s finacé Zain, a self-made real estate magnate, has hired to impress his clients. Tia and Alisha have share a rocky past with their parents—Tia’s father has just died, and has left her a will, her mother is a constant, bull-dozing presence on video call; Alisha’s father lives in Nashik and they don’t have much of a bond. On board, Zain and Alisha connect over sweet-nothings, and in the days and months that follow, they are full throttle into an affair that seems beyond their control. Meanwhile, Zain’s business fortunes take a hard hit and secrets long buried, resentments long nurtured and grief long suppressed spiral the characters down a perilous path.

The story, written by Batra and Ayesha Devitre Dhillon, juggles the past and present elegantly. In a slow and quietly tense build-up, we see that Alisha is festering in another wound, and whenever she faces trying circumstances, which appears to be all the time, she keeps circling back to agonizing images and moments from with her childhood with her parents, especially her mother. Kaushal Shah’s competent cinematography, and a doleful but uplifting music score by Savera Mehta and Kabeer Kathpalia punctuate the adroitly balanced and emotionally calibrated scenes.

Gehraiyaan is a film for the young at heart willing to see and understand relationships as irresistible connections, without the sanctimony and societal baggage that inevitably seep in to most characters and situations in Bollywood dramas. There are no salvos to this mess, only the lapse of time and deeply-guarded secrets, which ensures life goes on. Batra communicates this uncomfortable but authentically human truth with a warm-hearted and sharp set of behavioural nuances and fillips of dialogue.

What sets up the characters’ fragility and the emotional pivot around which the attraction between Alisha and Zain develop convincingly is the idea of intergenerational baggage—Alisha inherits the fear that she would be “stuck” like her mother was, and that she would have to follow the same trajectory that her mother did; Zain is at pains to still prove himself worthy to his mother, at least in his own heart, whom he left behind in an abusive marriage. The two women are also far from honest with each other. Will they eventually break the chain of mistrust and betrayal that they have inherited from their parents? Will they have the power to sever their frayed bond beyond the niceties? Batra does not offer any neat conclusions or big resolutions.

The four main actors, and others, notably Rajat Kapoor in the role of Zain’s business associate and Shah as a man in the twilight of his life tragically at peace with a hurtful, angry, alcoholic past, serve the demands of the economical screenplay efficiently. Padukone is the throbbing heart of the cast. Her maturity as an actor is amply clear in her embodying of Alisha—embracing and inhabiting the character’s flaws and foibles with ease, sensitivity and sympathy. Chaturvedi, relatively new to the lead role, also suitably channelises Zain’s casually dominating presence throughout. Pandey fits in to the people-pleasing good-girl grain of Tia perfectly, all the while conveying the character’s balance on an emotional precipice, magnified by suspicion, doubts and guilt.

In Gehraiyaan, Bollywood has an inventive take on family maladies and relationships between men and women damaged by past trauma, their souls worn thin by family servitude. The best part of the screenplay is that there is no obvious attempt to cure or correct them.