Of Valentines

and thriller Bollywood

So I weathered the social media buzz and watched Gehraiyaan despite my best intentions to avoid it. It turned out to be an incredibly quiet film. I can’t think of a person, before Deepika in this film (maybe Rekha with her deep feminine voice) - a heroine in mainstream Bollywood - who speaks so quietly. It is the first attractive thing about the film. Ananya Panday is irritating when she talks and when she is silent, but fits the character of a bored, rich girl quite well. The enigmatic Siddhant Chaturvedi appears. He looks like a chisel-bodied brat too, in the beginning, and opens in folds like an onion. There is a strange hunger in his eyes, I notice, early on. This guy is trouble. His rags to riches story. His chiseled body. His smooth manner. His bold maneuvers. All of him. And he turns darker and darker as the film progresses. Desire emanates from a strong urge to destroy. Zain, played by Chaturvedi, embodies that instinct brilliantly. Deepika does well as the tragic, pensive heroine Alisha. Her desperation, often shows, in her text messages and phone calls.

The film turns darker and darker, towards the end. It’s no longer about cheating and illegitimate love. It is a pure egotistic man’s ambition and hard will driving the plot now. The women are irrelevant. The film gets at the contradictory internal states of Zain through his mood swings, his quick changes of mind, his rapid dialogue delivery (I remain unimpressed by the overuse of the word ‘fuck’ though). The film is least about the vagaries of love, and less so, about the women, not even Deepika/Alisha with her anxiety meds and dark parental history. It is really about the mad ego of a young man, who will get what he wants at any cost. A hat-tip to the predictably restrained Naseer playing Alisha’s reticent, distant father, is called for.

This is an unfortunate observation to be having on the morning of Valentine’s Day. But love is, very often, about self-aggrandisation. Maybe that’s why religions talk about the need for suffering in love, to achieve a higher state of detachment. This day, is much less about dinner dates and Sri Ram Sene belligerence, and much more about a heightened rehearsal of our daily need for validation. The self that is motored by a raw ego, often manifests sharply in the love-narrative. Before one falls in love today, or in one’s youth, one should ask if love is a good substitute for a fix one was already on the hunt for, to see an idealised self-image in the lover’s admiration.