Somewhere in this film crops up a sentence which is meant to be profound; ‘it’s the digital age, lagta hai connected hain par shaayad itne akele kabhi nahin thay’ (it’s the digital age, we feel connected but we’ve never been so alone before). It’s spoken with an earnestness which tells you that the writer and speaker believe that they are saying it for the first time. Or even if they are repeating it, it will hit right with it’s PLU target audience. And don’t be fooled by the broad-based social media schtick: this is a film for the Insta generation by the Insta generation. ‘Kho Gaye Hum Kahaan’ is an expanded version of this statement of purpose, featuring spiffy young actors who are a perfect fit for this world: stand-up comic Imaad Ali (Siddhant Chaturvedi), smart market planner Ahana Singh (Ananya Panday) and her commitment-phobic boyfriend (Rohan Gurbaxani), gym rat Neil Pereira (Adarsh Gourav), and his influencer girlfriend (Anya Singh) with a million and growing head count. Mumbai-based besties Imaad-Ahana-Neil, who’ve been thick-as-thieves since school, are now in the process of adulting. The first two are flatmates, zooming in and out of each other’s rooms, swapping notes about failed dates, the kind of close yet platonic buddies that is a growing urban segment. The motherless, wounded Imaad is a Tinder addict (yes, this is an actual line in the film) ricocheting between his therapist, his guilt-ridden father, and an attractive older woman (Kalki Koechlin). Ahana is so desperate for her boy-friend’s attention that her self-esteem is in danger, but she doesn’t care: why won’t he be only with her? Neil, who lives with his parents, is figuring how to get out of his middle-class-life rut: will a ‘workout selfie’ with Malaika Arora (in a scene as herself) grow his ‘follower count’, and will that magically make him leap out into the stratosphere? This is an ensemble which is pleasing to the eye, working the carefully-casually ruffled look and feel of the young which speaks in a mix of slightly stagey English and Hindi: who says ‘main theek nahin hoon’? A bit of meta-ness hovers in the exchanges of Chaturvedi and Panday, who looks like she may yet turn into a real actor: at a roundtable IRL, he had spoken about the privileges she, and her ilk, have in Bollywood. Now here they are, sharing the screen, and the ‘n’ word feels like it’s been shoved out of the window, at least for this movie. Gourav is as effective as he always is. Even in its name, the film is basically an update of the Farhan-Zoya universe, who’ve been giving us confused youth learning to be grown-ups (Dil Chahta Hai, and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara). But those earlier kids lived in an era where their cellphones didn’t come attached to their hands, and managed to have conversations without having to depend on digital crutches. These kids use their phones as their friends-enemies-bed-warmers, seeking validation and connection, minute by minute: it’s almost like you can see this film on a phone. The writing is determinedly inoffensive. The jokes are mild. You can scroll through the film, stopping off at moments which try for depth (one in which a so-called friend turns into a boorish troll, revealing his classist ugliness, is nicely done, so is another in which a man does something awful to a woman for ‘closure’ ) but those are just ‘stories’. The rest feels like multiple reels, shoehorned into one tract: there’s pleasure, yes, but momentary. Kho Gaye Hum Kahan movie rating: 2.5 Kho Gaye Hum Kahan movie director: Arjun Varain Singh Kho Gaye Hum Kahan movie cast: Siddhant Chaturvedi, Ananya Panday, Adarsh Gourav, Kalki Koechlin, Anya Singh, Rohan Gurbaxani
