‘Gehraiyaan’ Review: Deepika Padukone Steers This Mature Take On Adult Relationships That Surprises You, Even In If It’s In The Shallows
Shall I compare Shakun Batra movies to waves on a beach? I could, because they often come at you with such overwhelming force of emotion and insight about relationships, that you’ll either let yourself be drawn into it, like in Kapoor & Sons, or wait for the wave to ebb away so you can see the sediment it leaves behind, like Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu. To me, Gehraiyaan feels like a bit of both. A nice big blue wave that is rushing towards you, with all the hyped cast, promotions and that trending music album which is addictive, NGL. But once you watch the film, you’ve to sit with it for a while to really digest all that it has left behind. And yet, it is still an exercise in the shallows, which doesn’t really make it to the deep like it promised. Gehraiyaan stars Deepika Padukone, Siddhant Chaturvedi, Ananya Panday, Dhariya Karwa, Rajat Kapoor and Naseeruddin Shah.
Gehraiyaan is directed by Shakun Batra, who has also written the story with Ayesha Devitre Dhillon. The screenplay is by Batra, Dhillon and Sumit Roy, additional screenplay by Yash Sahai, and dialogues by Sahai and Dhillon. The director of photography is Kaushal Shah. The music and original score are by OAFF and Savera, and the lyrics are by Kausar Munir and Ankur Tewari, with the latter also being the music supervisor.
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Gehraiyaan, as you probably already know from the trailers, is a story with infidelity as a core theme but not the only one. Alisha is a thirty-something yoga instructor, trying to grow professionally and personally so she can finally live the life she always wanted, but really because she’s afraid of being stuck in one place. Unfortunately, her old friend and boyfriend of six years, Karan, has lately been making her feel exactly that. He is a writer struggling to finish his book, having left a well-paying advertising job to pursue his dream, which doesn’t exactly help him to write them cheques to pay them bills. Adulting sucks, because Alisha feels like she’s doing it all by herself, while she also battles anxiety from the childhood trauma of what happened to her mother. But a reunion with her estranged cousin, Tia, at their family beach house in Alibaug, brings a tidal wave into Alisha’s life that changes everything.
Enter Zain, Tia’s fiancé and business partner. He and Alisha meet, sparks fly, and well, you know the rest. It adds a doozy of a complication to an already complicated relationship between Ti and Al. How this infidelity affects Alisha and Zain, their relationships with their respective partners, and eventually back at them, is what Gehraiyaan sets sail to explore.
Also Read: Gehraiyaan Trailer: This Shakun Batra Directorial Starring Deepika Padukone, Ananya Panday, Siddhant Chaturvedi Looks Promising
Gehraiyaan delivers on the aesthetics it promised, which truly elevate the story
Gehraiyaan looks and sounds beautiful. The sets— the beach house, Alisha’s home and Tia’s home—all speak volumes about the characters that inhabit them. Even the outfits donned by the actors perfectly align with their characters—Deepika’s Alisha wears elegant minimalist outfits in nude colours and looks gorgeous without trying; Tia is impeccably dressed and you can see she’s made an effort. It reveals so much about the kind of person the character truly is. The film’s colour palette of blues and greys really brings out the tonality, with the only warm colours popping in moments of intense passion between Alisha and Zain. I like the idea of their relationship existing mostly on water; the rules on a ship are different, and usually, the laws on the water are different too. The moment they hit terra firma, like when they’re in a hotel room or someone’s home, the reality really hits them. But on water, they’re invincible.
I’ve been listening to Gehraiyaan’s album on loop, with ‘Doobey’ clearly being the winner, and ‘Beqaaboo’ a close second. The film has just the right amount of music to further its story and not slow it down in any way. It’s not a luxury it can afford, considering the runtime is already at 2 hours 28 minutes.
Will you feel the runtime? I think, yes, but not because there’s no wind in the sails. But only because the subject is a heavy one that needs some steady, patient steering through troubled waters.
The film deals with infidelity, but it also touches on a lot more
Infidelity isn’t some virus you just randomly catch because it is in the air. There’s an undercurrent for why someone might cheat in a relationship, and Gehraiyaan manages to build that for Deepika’s character, Alisha and in some ways, for Zain too. But infidelity isn’t the only thing it explores. There are some real relationship lessons here for couples who’re considering a life together, the primary being to make sure that you’re financial goals and status goals also align, so no one person has to bear the burden of sustaining your lifestyle. And never trust your partner blindly when it comes to paperwork. Through Alisha’s character, we realise that a lot of times, parents really mess up their kids and the strained relationships can have a huge impact on their adult selves. What perhaps was the most heartbreaking to see was how a single decision by a parent estranged two sisters who deeply cared for each other as kids and turned them into friends who barely knew each other.
What I loved about Gehraiyaan though is that it doesn’t deliver any judgement on infidelity when it ends. Like most adult relationships, which are, for the lack of a better phrase, fifty shades of grey, it doesn’t colour infidelity and the characters that indulge in it in black. It’s a small part of their lives, it’s not their entire personality and does not define them. It speaks volumes of what is lacking in their respective relationships but also about how a lot of it is their fault, because they themselves might’ve chosen this fate for them. And that puts the onus on personal choice, and not on circumstances or the other people in their lives. Which is both accurate and in some ways empowering too. The way modern dating and relationships are today is aptly captured by the film.
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However, the film doesn’t exactly sail into the deep waters it promised…
I like to call this the Fault In Our Marketing Stars, because often a film is marketed as this intense deep dive into something but the end result then is underwhelming. Unfortunately, Gehraiyaan does feel like that because it misses the deep exploration of infidelity that it seemed to promise. I especially was bothered by the very uni-dimensional characters of Tia, played by Ananya Panday, and Karan, played by Dhairya Karwa. Especially Karan, I thought deserved a decent track of his own to explore his emotions and what caused him to become this person that Alisha fell out of love with. Even for Tia, the grand moment where the full spectrum of her emotions would be a display never arrives, and it feels like a lost opportunity for both these characters and the actors playing them to really flex those acting muscles.
Now while I do think Siddhant Chaturvedi and Deepika Padukone had hot chemistry, I would’ve loved for the film, which is clearly steering clear of Bollywood tropes and putting on the look and feel of a dark American drama on relationships, to amp up the sex quotient a bit more. I think the intimate scenes (both physical and not-so-physical) look beautiful, and it is because of this that I wanted to see some more of it, to raise the overall temperature of the water, so to say. Especially since they were going for an OTT release. With so many hot attractive people on board, I was hoping for a little more heat.
But Gehraiyaan surprised me with how it ended
I was most curious about how Shakun Batra was going to end this one. I saw the red herrings he weaved in here and there, which made me think, “Okay, now the other shoe will drop,” “Okay, it’s all over now.” But the final act came as quite a surprise because mainstream Bollywood usually doesn’t have the guts to do what this one did. Hollywood has pulled this off quite a few times, and it’s where I think Gehraiyaan manages to score an extra point from me for not falling into the cliché trap. Well done, guys.
As I mentioned in the beginning, Gehraiyaan ends with this bolt of the blue that is so sudden that it surprises you. And I found myself pondering, way after the movie was over and the credits were rolling, what the film had left me with and what it was trying to convey about relationships and trauma. I couldn’t help thinking that while I like what the film looks and feels like, the ending makes me wonder if this film could’ve been written like a thriller, sped up a bit, and turned into something hotter and sexier, and completely different!
Performances
I mean, this undoubtedly is Deepika Padukone’s film through and through. her Alisha feels raw and mysterious, a complicated puzzle that no wonder someone like Zain wants to spend his life solving. She’s quite the presence on screen, with those intense looks, and my God, that yoga pose she pulls off for a scene! Siddhant Chaturvedi manages to steal my attention plenty of times too. His Zain is probably exactly the kinda red flag guy I’d fall for! Ananya Panday does what she can do with her character Tia, and it looks like she is playing herself here. But I reiterate, this feels like a missed opportunity for both her and Dhairya Karwa as Karan to do more, but for no fault of theirs.
Verdict
Gehraiyaan surprised me, a lot. With the chemistry between its pairs, the range of topics it explored, and its music. But mainly it’s tackling of infidelity. And that’s an achievement considering most movies that deal with infidelity are headed in this one very predictable direction. Scratch that, what I mean is, most Bollywood movies have headed in that one direction. Gehraiyaan is more mature in the way it subverts tropes, uses aesthetics to speak louder than words and closes (0r doesn’t close?) its character arcs. My biggest takeaway from the film, and my favourite thing about it, will remain Siddhant and Deepika’s chemistry and its take on infidelity, which neither does it demean nor does it condone. And my only regret would be that it could’ve delved a little deeper into some of its uni-dimensional characters’ lives as the title promised.
Nevertheless, Shakun Batra has done it again. Gehraiyaan is a coming-of-age of Bollywood movies that tackle adult relationships sans judgement, and for that, I recommend you definitely watch it.
Gehraiyaan arrives on Amazon Prime Video on February 11, 2022.
