A Deep Dive into Gehraiyaan
Another rant on how this movie is more than “just about sex.” Nothing new to see here.
[Content Warning: This article discusses suicide, trauma, and mental illness.]
My mother and I watched Gehraiyaan last week, and we spent the next couple of hours discussing the movie. For the extent of media coverage it received, the movie produced in us a mere indifference. We loved especially the last fifteen minutes. But we couldn’t figure out why the movie was as polarizing as it had proven to be.
Yes, trauma makes us do things that seem right at the time but seem regrettable later. Trauma destroys our ability to experience joy and connection, and it sabotages the little joy and connection that we do feel. There are movies that have shown it better and there are movies that have shown it worse. There was nothing new we could spot in Gehraiyaan that deserved this much attention and anger.
Just a little summary for those who don’t know about this movie. Beware, there are spoilers.
Gehraiyaan is a 2022 Indian Hindi-language movie directed by Shakun Batra, from Kapoor and Sons fame. It follows Alisha or “Al” (played by the incredible Deepika Padukone) who struggles with the trauma of losing her mother to suicide. Having solidified its roots in her mind as a child, the image of her mother hanging from the ceiling makes it hard for Alisha to look up at the fan without having anxiety. It almost severs her relationship with her father, whom she blames for her mother’s death. It makes it difficult for her to connect with her boyfriend, Karan (Dhairya Karwa).
She meets Zain (Siddhant Chaturvedi) at the beach house of her cousin Tia or “Ti” (Ananya Pandey). Alisha and Zain are drawn to each other because of their similar experiences with trauma and loss, and they begin a relationship. The only caveat? Zain is engaged to Tia.
There were a couple of ways they could have taken this. One was the typical-Bollywood-drama way, where the “cheating” people are villainized for transgressing the boundaries of their respective monogamous relationships. Another way was to tilt completely to the other end and humanize the “cheating” people, showing their heartfelt connection.
The movie doesn’t do either. It just states the facts: Here are two traumatized people; here are their light-hearted partners, untouched by trauma; here is this relationship. I guess they opted for this type of storytelling because the movie was never about the relationship; it was about something else.
But the movie tore the audience in half. People were bashing the movie online, calling it disgusting. For a while, every other Instagram story I saw was about how bad this movie is and how much people hated it. How could she do this to her cousin? Trauma is not an excuse!
The most common criticism that I came across online was that the movie was about sex and nothing else. I didn’t immediately understand this accusation. The movie had just two sex scenes and the characters spoke about sex only once throughout the film.
A little while after our discussion, my mother said, “People might have not liked Deepika’s character. She’s just depressed and sad through the whole movie.”
I couldn’t disagree with her. Yes, Alisha is depressed for most of the movie. She has no pep in her step while working at her yoga studio. When she goes downstairs to throw out the garbage, she stands with her hands on her hips and sighs or stares into space in unexplained silence. She hardly smiles, and when she does, it seems practised. She refuses to call her father even though he constantly tries to reach out to her.
The plot of the story, too, keeps escalating to a point where everyone and everything is a hot mess; people are suspicious of each other, couples are accusing each other of god-awful things, and Alisha is just crying for scenes at a stretch.
Perhaps this was the reason why the movie was so polarizing: India is just not ready for the reality of mental illness.
Every movie about mental illness, especially in the last couple of years, is painted over with hope. I love Dear Zindagi, but there is no denying that this movie is a castle in the air. Think about the plot: A woman is confused about her job; she struggles with her relationships; she reluctantly leaves her independent little home and goes to her parents’ place. There, she finds a therapist so she can get better. Therapy is hard — it digs out all her insecurities — but then, in the end, she experiences a catharsis.
She asks for help, she gets it, and she becomes better because of it. That’s the mental illness story we want.
The truth is often more complicated. In real life, it is difficult to recognise when we need help. It is not easy to ask for help, and many times, when we do ask, there is no help out there. In Gehraiyaan, Alisha is taking medication, but she is still in pain. The day-to-day complexities of making decisions when your mind is clouded by trauma flashbacks are not something that can be “fixed” with medication.
For those who are screaming “go to therapy then” at their screens: therapy is inaccessible to so many. Therapy is sold to us as a one-shot solution to all problems, but in real life, some people don’t have familial support to go to therapy, some don’t have money to afford it, and some don’t know how to put the layers and layers and layers of pain into words.
In Alisha’s case, I believe it is this last reason. Her entire life is a cumulation of bringing herself up after losing her mother and watching her father drink himself to death. Her father never explained why her mother committed suicide or why they separated from Tia’s family. In the absence of this part of her story, Alisha makes up her own explanations to feel some certainty about her past. It is not easy to recognise where your pain is coming from when memory is so selective.
Therapy in India (and according to me, therapy in general) is still at a very nascent stage. The most common treatment given here is CBT or Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. Despite having its positives, this form of therapy relies solely on what the client tells the therapist and any recognisable thought patterns found through standardized tests.
What if your thought patterns slip your eye and the eye of the standardized tests? Are our therapists skilled enough to deal with that kind of trauma?
So, help out there is limited. Now desperate, we seek support in people. Do you understand me? we ask in every interaction. Do you understand why I’m so sensitive, why I don’t call you back, why I am tired all the time?
Often, we find this connection in people who have gone through just as much as we have: those people whose feet are heavy from their experiences and who are slow to laughter.
Zain and Alisha don’t have explain to each other why they are this way — they just know. And that, I am inclined to believe, might have been a huge relief.
Trauma may not be an “excuse,” but trauma is real, and it takes forms we may not always see as “moral.” Most times it is an explanation for how a person behaves. Are we willing to have that conversation, even though it is hard for us?
This is not to say that Gehraiyaan does it right. It seems to lose track in the middle. Zain’s whole business strategy went on for a bit too long, and then, towards the end, he tries to kill Alisha. Why does this suddenly feel like a soap opera?
The mistake this movie makes is it expects the audience to have an understanding of trauma, and how it influences connection, before they watch the movie. There is no focus on “why” Alisha and Zain connect. In one weak scene, the characters talk about their childhood traumas but it doesn’t suffice to make the audience feel their pain.
And without this crucial information about why they started their affair, people assumed that the reason was lust and that the movie is only about sex. Not that there is anything wrong with a movie that is only about sex, but this is not that movie.
Gehraiyaan was trying to be unapologetic about the “ugly” side of trauma, but it fell through because of poor execution.
Perhaps we needed more scenes with Zain and Alisha sharing the tough decisions they had to make. Perhaps we needed to see Zain’s face when he finally decides to leave his mother. Perhaps we needed to see Karan trying to understand Alisha but continuing to feel that she is being “unnecessarily intense” since he has never really walked in her shoes.
I did love the question it left us with, though.
If we let go of our past, will it let go of us too?
