Gehraiyaan makes viewers plummet to a bottomless pit
Deepika Padukone, Siddhant Chaturvedi, Ananya Pandey, Dhairya Karwa, Naseerudding Shah, Rajat Kapoor
Shakun Batra
Gehraiyaan, directed by Shakun Batra, has been posing for a couple of weeks as a modern logon ki love story with some seriously steamy, sexy scenes for which an “intimacy director” had to be engaged, a lady called Dar Gai. But now that the film has dropped on Amazon Prime, we know why there was so much chatter about “passionate” scenes involving Deepika Padukone and Siddhant Chaturvedi.
Gehraiyaan, produced by Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions and others, is a mishmash of Woody Allen’s Match Point (2005) and Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna (2006).
But Batra, who shares writing credits for the film with three others, couldn’t even copy-paste properly. His Gehraiyaan begins like a desi version of Match Point under the shadow of KANK, and then turns into a bizarre thriller involving property deals, shell companies, corporate fraud, ED investigation, blackmail, a family secret and a murder plot.
If there’s anything that saves the first half of Gehraiyaan it is Deepika Padukone, and Ananya Pandey to a small extent.
These two actresses carry the burden of this film on their slender shoulders with thoda-sa help. Kushal Shah’s cool cinematography and Nitesh Bhatia’s sharp editing try to insinuate that there’s some depth to Gehraiyaan, though there is none.
Gehraiyaan tells the story of two couples. There’s Alisha (Deepika Padukone), a yoga instructor, and her boyfriend is Karan (Dhairya Karwa). They live together but are unhappy. Karan has quit his job and is writing a book, but he refuses to share the draft with Alisha though she is the one who is paying the bills by doing all sorts of upward-downward dog and cat-cow asanas.
Alisha carries some childhood trauma and a grudge against her father (Naseeruddin Shah). Sad memories keep coming back to her, and she worries that she too will end up being “stuck” like her mummy. So she takes anxiety pills and stays on with Karan till...
Then there’s Tia (Ananya Pandey), Alisha’s US-returned cousin, and her businessman
boyfriend Zain (Siddhant Chaturvedi). Tia owns a gorgeous beach house and invites Alisha and Karan to meet Zain and spend a few days with them. An engagement date is fixed and Tia is looking forward to her Tuscany wedding. But Zain doesn’t seem too much into her or into playing dulha.
Though Zain runs his own business and is quite proud of it, Tia’s Mummyji keeps reminding him about how much money they have invested in his company, and that he must remain forever grateful to them. Zain’s ego bristles everytime he is reminded of this, so when he spots sweet, slender and slightly sad Alisha, he gravitates towards her.
This first part of Gehraiyaan is shot in many shades of sea and sky blue and is quite nice though the aforementioned sexy scenes are all too brief and really not that hot.
But the bit about people suffocating in unhappy relationships and wanting to get out is nice. And this is where Gehraiyaan feels like it’s the modern, smoothie-sipping, OTT child of KJo’s blockbuster, Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna.
Instead of KANK’s grand scale, razzle-dazzle and emotional embrace, Gehraiyaan has the formality of aaj-ke-modernbachche who carry yoga mats wherever they go and whose relationship status is forever “complicated”.
This part of the film, made up of toned, tanned bodies posing in posh locations, and Alisha’s long silences, dimpled smile, is pretty and engaging. But soon after, as cheaters head for an appointment with a gynaecologist, Gehraiyaan, which didn’t have much depth to begin with, goes totally bonkers. Lies threaten relationships, fraud threatens businesses, a secret is revealed, a father returns, a body gets washed up ashore and we wonder how did a film that had some potential end up as a deranged, annoying psychological thriller.
As I sit writing this review and recalling scenes from Gehraiyaan, all I can remember is how stunningly beautiful and sexy Deepika Padukone is. She lights up the scene and is the film's emotional core. Siddhant Chaturvedi has many scenes and plays a fairly interesting character, but he is so forgettable that all I can recall is his body, not his face.
Deepika Padukone, who has to go through a whole gamut of emotions as Alisha who is sometimes happy but often sad, sometimes hyper and often popping anxiety pills, carries all the load of Gehraiyaan. If the film is at all watchable, it’s because of her. I wish she had got a better script and a better director.