Devil’s Advocate is a rolling column that sees the world differently and argues for unpopular opinions of the day. This column, the writer acknowledges, can also be viewed as a race to get yourself cancelled. But like pineapple on pizza, he is willing to see the lighter side of it.
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Houston we have a divider! If Shakun Batra’s brief to everyone on his set was to make a film nobody would be able to figure and therefore will not stop talking about, then mission accomplished. Not since Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! have I read pieces and opinions that perceive the same film in so many different ways.
Gehraiyaan is simultaneously a masterpiece and a piece of garbage. It is almost as if Batra cracked an egg that burst out as an omlette, and now has everyone hooked on debating what that formative yolk was, is or could have been. The main reason, however, that Gehraiyaan defies definition, and therefore some comprehensive consensus, is because it is so many genres in one — some of them brilliant, some of them jarring, but overall, a confusing mess. It is Rachel’s (remember that Friends episode? Of course you do) Thanksgiving pie.
Cinema, more than any other art form, thrives on consensus. The fact that Gehraiyaan cannot build any is both its strength and its weakness. It is strength because it will keep you up, enrage you, and motivate you to discuss it angrily with others. But it is also a weakness because it is ultimately dissatisfying as a whole. Much of this is to do with how many genres the film is trying portray often with the misleading lens of something else entirely. It is as if the creative team walked into a room, forgot what they went in for, and returned to make a different film every time.
The idea of inter-generational trauma, though it lands and is admirable as a subject, does not stick. The sibling dynamic that Batra has already explored in his previous film Kapoor & Sons, continues to intrigue but here, it is just one of the many things. And therein lies the film’s biggest problem — its utter cluelessness about what it wants to be.
It is almost as if the film, by accident or design, says 'here is everything.' It is like a Kickstarter campaign that also wants the donor to define the cause. There is a hint of the economic hardships that Sairat paired with love but not enough sincerity to exhibit anything like it — even for the rich people involved here. There is romance and infidelity, but none of the people look like they are into it. There is a sudden pulpy quality to the twist of a pregnancy, a noiresque shift in the murder, and desperation of the latter half, and revelatory sense to the climactic moments. It is like hopping genres on narrative acid.
Gehraiyaan is a sibling drama without the required acting chops or depth, a comment maybe on modern relationships without the structural equity of one [is there chemistry between anyone onscreen?], a corporate greed tale without enough of the intra-office dynamics, a self-effacing elite comedy like a Woody Allen film but completely bereft of irony or humour, and a tale of inherited trauma that feels more like a late plugin rather than the genesis of everything that precedes it. It is the wall sprayed with our brain, after the trigger of all good ideas in one basket has been pulled. It is not even obscure in a David Lynch kind of way. The bird that craps on the yacht, though, would make for a good anti-capitalism NFT.
Tackling several genres inside the structure of one film is not new, neither is subverting its most common tropes [most recently in Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog]. Netflix India’s Looop Lapeta, for example, uses farce as a tone to get to a comment about love, whether it is between the protagonists, a middle-aged gym owner and his gay lover, or between a father and his two incompetent sons. In Gehraiyaan, there is crime, drama, romance, noir, tragedy, dramedy, working class struggles, first world problems, everything you could want, but also a lot that does not fit.
Which is probably what makes Gehraiyaan narratively simple and technically incoherent to the point that even these jarring genre hops are being discussed as masterly deceits.
A lot of films like Imtiaz Ali’s Tamasha perhaps become cult not necessarily for being good but because they appeal to a certain peeve of the audience. Gehraiyaan, on the other hand, defies description, and not in a good way where it is outside the reach of mere mortals. In fact, it sets out to achieve so many things at once, one after the other, that it is impossible ascertain what nut goes in what bolt, what is intentional and what isn’t.
Because if it were the former, it would have a clear sight of its destination and the path required to get there. And not be the befuddling mix of genres that basically restricts two people from looking at it the same way. It is good if it happens about a couple of things, key moments that define a film. But not its entirety, not across the length of a two-hour film that feels like one hot take after the other on a variety of things without achieving the oonchaiyaan of either.
Gehraiyaan is streaming on Amazon Prime Video India.
Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.
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