Gehraiyaan Movie Review: Deepika Padukone, Siddhant anchor this Shakun Batra film

Moving on and moving away are two very different things. Moving on is a choice – hard, frustrating, and unlike what cinema, pop culture and literature tell you.

It isn’t beautiful. Moving away is simply surrendering to the helplessness you’re feeling at that moment. Shakun Batra’s Gehraiyaan, starring Deepika Padukone, Ananya Panday, Siddhant Chaturvedi and Dhairya Karwa, and Naseeruddin Shah and Rajat Kapoor in supporting cast, dives straight into this kashmakash, as it were. After a rather stormy middle, the Amazon Prime Video release does find calmer waters.

Tia (Ananya) and Alisha (Deepika) are cousins. Certain choices made for them when they were too young have led them to grow up as two very different individuals. But each is a reflection of their past – Alisha, especially, of her mother.

And that’s something Shakun Batra reveals slowly, almost sensuously, just as you’re more and more invested in the film. Zain (Siddhant) is Tia’s fiance, a promising entrepreneur in the real-estate sector, while Karan (Dhairya), Alisha’s boyfriend of six years, is a struggling novelist who’s just quit a job in advertising to write his first book. Things unravel, and fast, when they head off on a holiday to Alisha and Tia’s beach house in Alibaug, a house they frequented as kids.

Shakun Batra firmly sticks to the metaphor he was trying to go for with the title – gehraiyaan. So, on the surface, Tia and Zain’s lives seemed perfect – they were madly in love, living in lavish houses, jetting off to Alibaug from the Mumbai coast on a yacht instead of the humble ferry. In comparison to that, Alisha is just stuck. Floating, but not really reaching the shores. Deep down, Zain and Tia’s lives may be vastly different, as the audience is slowly made aware of, but on the surface, it is perfect.

A bit of friendly flirting, a sexual tension you could cut with a knife, some more nudging over the next few days, and Alisha and Zain find a sense of passion taking over and they cannot help but succumb to their most carnal desires. Was Alisha attracted to Zain, or the idea he led on?

The best part about Gehraiyaan is that it doesn’t reveal too much in the trailer, just enough to hook you. Slyly enticing you with the kissing and the lovemaking scenes. For, Alisha and Zain hooking up and essentially cheating on their respective partners isn’t the only complexity Gehraiyaan gives you. It is only the tip of the iceberg their lives are about to hit.

Gehraiyaan is a very stylish film, almost too clean for its own good. Shakun clearly was going for a Hollywood vibe in order to make this story about cheating palatable to the larger Indian audience. He was largely successful. The unabashed ripping off of clothes, hungry kisses, flunking-each-other-on-the-bed kind of lovemaking – glimpses of which we saw in the trailer – take up a major part of the film. Was it all necessary? Perhaps in Shakun’s mind it was, simply to justify that we’re all enslaved by our desires.

But the Hollywood varnish caused some disconnect too. Tia and Zain’s suave, branded clothes blend right into their lifestyle. But Zain and Alisha’s affluent wardrobe sticks out like a sore thumb. The only thing middle-class about this couple is that Alisha has to take out the garbage herself, and their bathroom and kitchen tiles are builder and not Italian. And yet, money is an issue between them – Alisha complains about how she’s been lugging the household alone for four years with her income as a yoga instructor, while Karan can’t even finish the first draft of the book.

In terms of performances, credit must first be given to the casting director. Deepika brings out Alisha’s juxtaposing desire and reluctance to get out of a hole she keeps digging for herself. And Siddhant beautifully portrays Zain’s brash yet polite pride at achieving whatever he has singlehandedly, coupled with an easily bruised male ego, rooted in something very humble. He wants to crack every deal and she wants to be saved.

Ananya as Tia is perfect. She brings out Tia’s high-society flamboyance with a soft, pulpy heart with the utmost sincerity. Dhairya as Karan, with the least amount of screen time in all, does his job well too. Rajat Kapoor as Zain’s business advisor Jitesh and Naseeruddin Shah as Alisha’s father are just nuggets of brilliance in Gehraiyaan.

But Gehraiyaan’s runtime could pose a problem. At 2 hours and 30 minutes, without songs to breakout into except the ones with montages of Alisha and Zain’s fast-spiralling illicit affair, it is perhaps too long for OTT viewing. Especially when there’s no interval. But Shakun does his best to hold the audience, adding enough twists to ensure you are never bored.