Moderately entertaining and occasionally perceptive
Its main character Kho Gaye Hum KahanDirected by debutant Arjun Varain Singh from a script he wrote with Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti, digital natives struggle to stay close to and adapt to the real world.
Their emotions and actions, private and public, are mediated or directly influenced, by social media. On the face of it, their lives, as reflected through the tints and filters of their reels and posts, are full of fun and games.
Imad Ali (Siddhant Chaturvedi), Ahana Singh (Ananya Pandey) and Neil Pereira (Adarsh Gaurav), in their 20s and thick as thieves – are ensconced in a bubble that is just a punch away from being punctured. The three seem to have lots of friends and exciting escapades.
Scratch the surface and they are lonely souls with no shortage of problems. Severely limited attention spans make them vulnerable to hasty, topsy-turvy relationships and confusing assumptions.
Kho Gaye Hum KahanA moderately entertaining and occasionally perceptive Netflix film, produced by Excel Entertainment and Tiger Baby, covers familiar ground but succeeds to a remarkable degree in giving a fresh and coherent spin to the coming-of-age genre.
The story spans over a year in the lives of Imad, Ahana and Neil. It opens on a New Year’s Eve and ends on the following, 12 tumultuous months that stir alarmingly for the trouble-prone triumvirate.
will be Dil chahta hai (which heralded the birth of Excel Entertainment at the turn of the millennium) Is this what it looks like 20 years later seeing the light of day and playing in the centenary? or will be Archies (2023’s Tiger Baby, another Netflix film) has similarities Kho Gaye Hum Kahan Was it (at least in part) set around our time and its characters a decade older? It’s hard to say.
In essence, Kho Gaye Hum Kahan Winds its own furrow through the well-worn tropes of twenty-somethings and grapples with the bits of their lives that they either want to erase entirely or hurry up and whisk away in one piece. Either way, many problems stare them in the face.
Three friends learn the hard way that social media is a fun game. It takes no time to go from being a safe sinecure to being a slippery slope. It is a sharp double-edged sword that can cut deep and cause wounds.
Imad is a stand-up comic with an apparently comfortable life that is haunted by the past. He shares a flat in South Bombay with Ahana Singh (Ananya Pandey), a B-school grad stuck in a dead-end sales job.
Neil Perera (Adarsh Gaurav), a gym instructor who lives with his parents (Vijay Maurya and Divya Jagdale) in a middle-class housing society in suburban Mumbai, is Imad and Ahana’s best friend.
Neil aspires to open his own fitness studio but doesn’t have the bank balance to have a real chance of realizing his dream anytime soon. I don’t know what I’m doing with my life, she says. He can also speak for his two friends.
They are almost always on their phones, rarely paying attention to the world that passes them by. Their homes and workplaces are boxes that do not open to the larger environment and reveal life and people on the ground.
Director of photography Tanoy Satam sets up shots and sequences that look at the building the three friends live in from the outside and the four walls of the rooms they occupy from the inside.
The camera captures them – Ahana and Imad occupy two rooms in a flat, the open-mic performance space where Imad sells his comic wares, the gym where Neil works out and his parents’ modest apartment – but rarely sees them beyond the screen’s window. the city
Occasional aerial shots of cityscapes evoke a sense of distance. Only Mumbai makes her ‘presence’ felt in some concrete terms when Ahana’s visiting mother, upset by the city’s sultry weather, asks her to turn on the AC before entering her apartment.
Kho Gaye Hum Kahan The focus is on the turmoil between the individual cocoons of Imad, Ahana and Neel. Secrets, inadequacies, heartbreaks and catastrophes make up all three.
Imad deals with a difficult past. Sessions with a therapist (Suchitra Pillai), conversations with his father (Rahul Vohra) and intimate moments with an older, wiser woman (Kalki Koechlin) hint at the exact nature of his trauma that he finds on Tinder, a handful for the emotionally fragile young man.
Ego serves a broken heart. Her boyfriend of three years (Rohan Gurbaxani) has left her, sending her into a spiral of wrongdoing (most of them social media-induced, of course). She can’t get Rohan off her mind.
Neil’s equation with a client and influencer (Anya Singh) is most volatile. The middle-class boy has showdowns and many reversals as he seeks to break free from the inhibitions and doubts that his social environment has filled him with.
Three often request privacy. Imad in particular hides his innermost thoughts behind his comic set and light-heartedness. Ironically, they, Ahana more than the other two, don’t mind making their feelings public for all to see and judge.
Windows film plays a key role. Through them visitors can see tiny fractions of the Mumbai skyline and not the city at street level. Simran Kohli, the photographer who makes her way into the life of the commitment-phobic Imad, is a world apart.
He’s in the middle of a project investigating “Tinder people” to find the real faces behind the dating app’s masks. A stray shot of Satyajit Ray’s mural shows Charulata standing at a green-loud window peering through her binoculars at Simran.
He is Imad and his companion. He focuses on faces to map the realities they conceal. Place and experience are just as important to him. “The easiest way to change one’s perspective is to move to a new city,” says Simran Not for him the lure and trap of a virtual world where blinders and filters dictate what we see and in what light we see it.
His is a touching art of a world obsessed by confusing images. He works with analog film rolls. He develops his photos chemically in a darkroom where he has complete control. And that’s in sharp contrast to Gen Z’s view of life, which prioritizes their social media masks over everything else.
Siddhant Chaturvedi has the most role Kho Gaye Hum Kahan But ideal glory is the most influential. Ananya Pandey does enough of a character stuck in a single-note loop.
It may be centered on the surface of cocooned life, but Kho Gaye Hum Kahan Finds the depth and layers that make it stand out and make it a film to watch.
