Movie! 123: Kho Gaye Hum Kahan.
Hello, a late merry Christmas and a happy, happy new year! Cheers to being nearly a quarter through this century (I guess?).
This week’s movie: Kho Gaye Hum Kahan.
How refreshing it is to watch a film set in our ever-evolving social media world that strikes so few wrong notes. How refreshing it is to see a film about friends in their twenties, played by actors in their twenties and directed by a director of similar age. How refreshing it is to watch opposite-sex friendships on screen that don’t necessarily tip into romance. Kho Gaye Hum Kahan is a film that spends very little time translating young people for those older than them. Debutant director Arjun Varain Singh works from a script he co-wrote with Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti, but the collaboration with the much more established and significantly older co-writers (who are also co-producers) does not weigh heavily on his film.
While KGHK exists in the trademark Akhtar milieu of the well-settled, urban lifestyle – and also casts some of her usual actors, including Sonali Sachdev, Ikhlaque Khan, Suchitra Pillai, Vijay Maurya, Kalki Koechlin and Ashish Sawhney – Singh consistently makes his voice heard. And this is perhaps most evident in the fact that KGHK, for the most part, doesn’t talk down to us and doesn’t misunderstand the very real issues it grapples with. The film deals with the perils of social media, but there are no instant viral videos, no unrealistically sudden leaps in numbers, no youngsters fetishistically worshipful of their mobile phones. While these are all true phenomena, filmmakers use them as crutches of exaggeration to make their points. But watching an extreme example is often an unhelpful way of understanding a widely recognisable problem: our relationships with the internet are fraught already; we don’t need hyperbole to know this.
What’s perhaps Singh’s greater accomplishment, though, is that KGHK is consciously bigger than social media. This is, at its heart, a film about relationships, about friendships, and about how we relate to one other. And its lens is internet-assisted interaction. Ahana Singh (Ananya Panday) and Imaad Ali (Siddhant Chaturvedi) are flatmates; they form a trio of childhood best friends with Neil Pereira (Adarsh Gourav), who lives with his parents. (If the fact of the three protagonists being from three major Indian religions was an intentional choice, this is never underlined nor pertinent to the story.) Each is in their mid-twenties, struggling to figure things out – though, as Neil and Imaad privately agree, Ahana is more settled than they are. At the film’s start, she has a steady boyfriend in Rohan (Rohan Gurbaxani) and is the only one of the three with a reliable desk job. Neil is a gym trainer; Imaad, a stand-up comic. She’ll look after them if their careers tank, they laughingly tell each other.
Singh’s hold on the dynamics within the group is strong, even though how they came to know one another and form this triad is skipped over. Each of them has a slightly different relationship with the others. Ahana and Imaad share a comfortable exasperation, borne out of their shared living space; Neil is more protective of Ahana (although, as I have said, this is not taken as a hint of romantic interest). When Rohan unceremoniously asks Ahana for ‘space’ and a ‘break’, Neil disparagingly declares of him, ‘Guts!’ The actors help realise these relationships well; both Chaturvedi and Gourav are striking in their roles, and Panday, back in Gehraiyaan territory, is easy and comfortable. They help tide us over narrative bumps, such as the mildly contrived opening scene at one of Imaad’s stand-up events, where his jokes about his two friends are used to set the three of them up.
After Rohan’s departure and his silence at the other end of text messages, Ahana begins to closely watch his social media, creating fake accounts and stalking his new girlfriend. But once again, there are no extremes: Ahana is depressed and obsessive, but other parts of her life continue as they were. She goes to work, she hangs out with her friends, she even galvanises Neil and Imaad into a possible joint business venture: Neil wants to start his own gym; Ahana’s business background can help with the setting up and running; Imaad’s inheritance from his mum can become their first investment.
Meanwhile, Neil is dating a client of his named Lala (Anya Singh, who is very good), an influencer on Instagram with a million followers. She has her own priorities, though, and Neil’s friends soon start to see that she’s just stringing Neil along. In fact, this is pretty obvious to us, the audience, as well. But then the writers put in a very forced scene (indicative of Akhtar and Kagti’s occasional tendency to over-explain) where Imaad does a stand-up set that voices his misgivings about Neil and Lala’s relationship. The jokes are funny, but it’s a heavy-handed way of creating genuine conflict.
Imaad’s own relationship with social media comes through in his addiction to Tinder: he has one-night stands and then blocks the person the next morning. He meets Simran (Koechlin), a photographer ten years his senior, whose genuine affection and companionship (in addition to great sex) give him pause.
The script interweaves these various strands in an involving fashion: they are each given equal importance and exposure. None of the characters, whether lead or supporting, is vilified or punished by the film for their actions. They help one another, but also hold one another accountable. This is true of the climax, which hinges on a major revelation, a major catharsis for one of them. But the writers’ decision to delay this plot development so late means that we don’t have much time to absorb it, and we are given no indication as to its impact. We move straight into the closing portions, which, while particularly affecting, are also particularly moralising. What has been observational thus far becomes a bit of a lecture: the last scene is set on New Year’s Eve and Ahana recites a string of hectoring resolutions.
Still, Singh makes several promising filmmaking choices. He trusts his audience – he expects us to understand the workings of the online world as few filmmakers have before. But his vision goes beyond this. It comes through in a scene where Lala finally tells Neil some truths as she is taking make-up off her face. Another piercing scene involving make-up is where Ahana dresses to the nines on her birthday, and we think it’s for a party, but then a sudden cut to her taking all her make-up off tells us it was just for Instagram; she marks the day with a quiet dinner at home. Imaad is accused at several points in the film of being afraid of emotional intimacy, which he brushes off, but notice how Singh elects never to film him in his own bedroom; yet in the flat he shares with Ahana, we are frequently taken into her room, where Imaad habitually walks in without knocking. The reverse never occurs. Even the film’s sole filmy moment (a physical fight that is broken up by an unexpected arrival) comes off less as contrived, more as winking, a result of the understated vibe that the rest of the movie exists in. I enjoyed and was quite taken by Kho Gaye Hum Kahan.
Kho Gaye Hum Kahan is on Netflix.