‘Gehraiyaan’ review: The price children pay for the unlived lives of parents
Life as we know it is the sum of all our hopes and fears. No one has come back from the dead to tell what it’s like to leave everything you have loved in a blink of an eye. You choose to live to either see a new day or forget the previous one and this race between forming new memories and forgetting old ones gives us a reason to not get bored of life or existence, however you see it.
And then there is trauma. Trauma is not just a memory. In fact, the reason why it’s called trauma and not simply a bad memory is because it continues to shape who you are even decades after it took place. Trauma manifests itself in slots, like reading the same Ghalib couplet grows on you differently at different points in life, but there’s hardly anything poetic about trauma.
It either comes back to haunt you or surprise you with the strength you didn’t know you had. You can still negotiate with your hopes and fears because they are unfulfilled or unforeseen but you can’t put your trauma in a secret closet; it is like the untouched Buddha that witnesses your daily grind as a silent spectator on a tabletop until a long and anxious night makes it look like a jute monster.
Amazon Prime’s latest offering Gehraiyyan is a powerful allegory for not just trauma in general but the trauma inflicted upon a child due to the unlived lives of the parents. The film symbolises trauma and our struggle to escape its loop of seemingly pre-determined events through the ‘depths’ of the sea. If not a web of warped memories, for director Shakun Batra, trauma can be understood almost like the endless depth of the blue sea.
The emphasis on the sea and its crashing waves is so overt, that almost half of the film takes place by the sea and where the sea may not be in the backdrop, you get a sudden, unexpected, insert of crashing waves; a forced visual motif that mostly takes away from the gripping narrative.
The film kicks off with a heated argument in which the husband is telling the wife that they can always move cities, and start anew, while a kid (Alisha), wonders about the reason behind the argument, as well as the defeated look on her mother’s face. Decades later, 30-year-old Alisha (Deepika Padukone) is now a professional Yoga trainer trying to come up with an app that can fix your poses. She is also the sole breadwinner in her live-in relationship with Karan (Dhairya Karwa).
Karan is a novelist-to-be who is struggling to finish his draft, while Alisha’s app also runs into a technical glitch. In the middle of this couple’s misfiring about who is worse, they receive a vacation invite from Alisha’s cousin Tia (Ananya Pandey) and her fiancé, Zain Oberoi (Siddhant Chutrevedi), who is an up and coming real estate tycoon. The two couples meet on a yacht and there begins a series of self-reflection about relationships, shared trauma and why, as Amjad Islam Amjad, puts it:
Tum mere humsafar tau ho lekin,
Hum kahin per bhichar bhi saktay hain
Dair tak ek taveel raste per,
Saath tau ajnabi bhi chalte hain
But the film isn’t just about how you have interpreted this couplet, the film is also about ageing and choosing not to give in to the trauma that you have suffered at such a tender age that it becomes an almost innate aspect of your personality, and you live the rest of your life correcting your life’s course.
As anyone raised or born in a dysfunctional family would register, the vacuum left by the parents can never be fulfilled, not by a father or a mother figure of a partner, and while your only goal in life is to ensure your own children never get an incomplete childhood, the shadow of the past is so broad and inevitable that what happened to your parents always lurks over you as a possible solution to or consequence of your own life.
Yet, given the support of your family, regardless of how fractured your relationships are with each other, as well as a new-found purpose in life, you can overcome all histories. That is exactly what Deepika manages to convey in her neatest performance since Tamasha.
Alisha might in fact remind you of Tara, who uses all her brains and emotional depth to fix her love interest. Only, Alisha decides to fix herself and reorganise the world in a manner that her introspective journey goes beyond finding peace in her career or Yoga moves and actually turns the cycle of misfortune against her. Alisha makes difficult choices in order to make her life more liveable instead of making it palatable for someone else. That grip and command on the storyline, and the fact that there are no other stars in the film, allow Deepika to shine as the sole winner of Gehraiyaan, and that is truly incredible.
On the other hand, the Hawaiian shirts accompanied by the corporate-cool look don’t help Chutrevedi’s case at all. His presence and performance could only be justified by the fact that you don’t see too clearly when your past traumas mingle with your present confusions and they force you to look for random openings in life. He was at best a random opening for Alisha’s character; everything else that happened later deserved a much better performer.
In hindsight, if his character was imagined just like a ladder for Alisha to climb out of her mess and move on, then his casting made sense, but not the screen time. Both Ananya and Karwa fit perfectly in their respective roles as much as Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives may have worked against Ananya and branded her as the spoilt child of the upcoming Bollywood dynasties.
Takeaway: If there’s anything worse than losing your faith in God, it is losing your faith in your parents. The root that holds you together could crumble you for good but there’s always a new spring.
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