Bollywood actress Deepika Padukone has a task for you.
Watch the trailer of her latest intimate romantic drama ‘Gehraiyaan’, out on Amazon Prime Video on February 11, and try not to jump to the conclusion that it’s merely a sensuous film about illicit love.
It’s not about ‘A meets B, but falls in love with C’ tale, she tells us. Instead, brace yourself for a searing and meditative portrait of human frailty, regrets, resentment and redemption.
“Infidelity is not the only theme of this film … It’s one of the many themes and this film is extremely layered. What we are trying to say is that the minute you understand, the minute there’s empathy, the minute there’s understanding behind the motive, hopefully one becomes less judgemental,” said Padukone in an interview with Gulf News.
Padukone, who is one of Bollywood’s top actors with a steady raft of blockbusters, hopes ‘Gehraiyaan’ will break the ingrained mindset that ‘infidelity equals bad person’.
“We are conditioned to think like that and this film is trying to break exactly that stereotype. Again, it’s not like where you’re trying to say infidelity is a good thing or a bad thing … All our choices that we make in our lives stem from our past experiences and circumstances,” said Padukone.
In all fairness, viewers can be forgiven for thinking that this film plunges into the world of forbidden love with some reckless abandon.
The tantalising trailer of ‘Gehraiyaan’, with its brilliant foreboding atmospherics and haunting music score, opens with two cousins Alisha (Padukone) and Tia (Ananya Panday) embarking on a dreamy holiday with their partners at a lush beach house. When out-of-touch relatives reunite for a quick escape, you can expect long-buried family tensions to rear their heads. But what you don’t necessarily expect is how sparks fly between Alisha and Tia’s dreamboat of a fiance Zain (Siddhant Chaturvedi).
The trailer indicates that these two gorgeous people act on their mutual attraction and find themselves hurtling towards each other even if it means they will hurt the ones they are in a relationship with. Montages of choppy seas are interspersed as emotions and tempos rise, perhaps a nod to the film’s title which means ‘Depths’.
“I don’t think we are anyone to say if adultery is a good thing or a bad thing … Only the people who are in that experience can really decide for themselves whether it’s the right thing or the wrong thing for them to do,” said Padukone. And the thrill is in exploring the grey zones, says the actor.
“It’s not always black or not always white … but it’s not just a film that take you to forbidden places alone,” reminded Padukone. Her co-star Ananya Panday in a separate interview with Gulf News also spoke about how this film taught her to be less judgemental and how films that revel in the morally grey zones can make for riveting cinema.
And who better than director and writer of this film Shakun Batra to explore the complex themes of human emotions like love, betrayal and lust with a deft and sensitive hand?
His earlier work ‘Kapoor & Sons’ was a thoroughly enjoyable cinematic masterpiece on Indian family dynamics, sibling rivalry, parental conflict, acceptance and love.
His films effectively employ the ‘show, don’t tell’ technique where he invites his viewer into the minds and conflicted hearts of its actors. Batra is one of the few directors in Bollywood who loves to keep it subtle, without spoon-feeding every twist to his viewers. Although ‘Kapoor & Sons’ was largely a tempestuous family drama, complicated subjects such as same-sex relationships were woven in delicately.
“The idea of his films is to make you reflect and go inward. His films make you question everything — whether it’s your choices or your destiny that take you to a place where you land up eventually. You wonder if it’s just your destiny or is life about the choices that you have made,” said Padukone.
While we hear her words loud and clear, there is also no denying that Bollywood adores movies that turn the lens on reckless and selfish love. So why do you think our love-affairs with good-looking philanderers never go out of style? Producer and top-earner Padukone, who’s married to one of Bollywood’s most flamboyant and versatile actor Ranveer Singh, has an interesting theory up her fashionable sleeve.
“I think people vicariously live through these characters! I mean, where do these characters come from? They don’t drop out of thin air. Especially in a film like ‘Gehraiyaan’, you are really picking up from real life and picking up what’s happening around us,” said Padukone.
But she warns us that her film, also starring actor Dhairya Karwa as her endearing boyfriend and veteran actor Naseeruddin Shah as her estranged father, is not some tacky endorsement of adultery.
“A reason why people probably look forward to such movies is because there’s so much stigma attached to it in your real life. And I think that stigma really comes from, you know, judgement, and lack of understanding. What this film really is trying to do is to make people understand why this character makes these choices,” said Padukone. According to this actress, an empathetic gaze from the viewers towards its main players will make the film far more enjoyable.
“The minute you understand the mind and the motive behind ‘Why’ — why certain choices are made and the circumstances in which this character makes those choices, you are less judgemental about it all,” said Padukone. It will involve a bit of unlearning because Bollywood films have almost conditioned you to believe in utopian love stories. It’s a billion-dirham glossy fantasy machine where happily-ever-after endings set against trite conflicts are peddled year after year. It’s wonderfully escapist and the inner demons among the lovers are invariably played down. There was a time when Hindi films made its moolah from its loved-up protagonists going to picturesque mountains to declare their love joyously.
But times and tastes have changed, believes Padukone.
“There’s more room for complex stories now. Maybe the audience is more ready for it because directors and actors are far more willing today … Personally, I have always looked forward to that sort of roles and characters that are close to reality. What drew me to this film was that Alisha was so raw, so real, so relatable, and so vulnerable,” said Padukone.
It’s also the first time that an intimacy director was hired to shepherd the intimate scenes in the film. And Padukone — who also owns her own production house — believes that the expert’s presence made her feel safe at work
“Isn’t hiring an intimacy director the most professional thing to do. Without them, it’s like asking an actor to come set and shoot a song without a choreographer. Or how do you do an action film without an action director? Right! So how do you do intimacy without an intimacy director … It’s new to our world, but the West has been doing it for years,” said Padukone.
The cast and crew had several acting and icebreaker workshops at first before they even began filming ‘Gehraiyaan’. Bollywood is notorious for their cinematic quickies where actors work on multiple films at the same time, meaning they cannot afford to give their undivided attention to each of their projects. But Padukone represents a new breed of young actors who prefer to focus on quality rather than quantity.
“I am an actor by profession, but I think like an athlete,” said Padukone. Apparently, she found a soul brother in Batra.
“Shakun is very much like me. Very systematic, very organised, very disciplined … I lead my life like that too. Our OCD [obsessive compulsive disorder] sits well with us. Somewhere I feel I have made a friend for life … Our purpose with our craft is somewhat similar.” She also claims that she’s fascinated by how his mind works.
But Padukone wasn’t always this confident when it came to her work. Fifteen years ago, when she made her debut with Shah Rukh Khan in ‘Om Shanti Om’, Padukone was the proverbial babe-in-the-woods. She was naturally inexperienced, but with each film she made her footing stronger. Now she’s a bona fide superstar who commands the same respect and clout as any other male superstar in Bollywood. The mental health advocate has also taken fearless political stands in the past, setting her apart from her peers. So how does she look back her decade-plus career milestone?
“I have not realised it’s been 15 years because I am constantly pushing myself as a person and as a performer. I keep asking myself about how I can be better than I was yesterday and how I can do things differently. I want to push the envelope and impact future generations … But my best is yet to come,” said Padukone.
Without overthinking it, from the gut it felt like the right things to do for everyone …. When we set out to do this film two and a half years ago, there was no option of OTT [streaming] and we were set for a theatrical release. But then the pandemic happened with India seeing an OTT boom … OTT felt just right and helped us be more authentic to the story
