Prathyush Parasuraman
One Muslim, one Christian, one Sikh - all buddies in Bombay are trying to tackle life, love, and longing, Amar Akbar Anthony-ing their way into Tiger-Baby-Bombay, which is, to be fair, Bandra, mostly.
Narratives of trauma and catharsis, breakthroughs and bursts of clarity. The word “closure” gets used in a pivotal moment that mocks the very meaning of it. The film knows these words are abused irl and still abuses it.
Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, is charming and naive in the power it gives stories and words. It is filled with characters who speak and act in ways that don’t align, and who keep trying, through speech, to align their actions.
The thing about millennial therapy-speak is that as clarifying and edifying as it can be, it also does an incredible violence upon the complexity of life, reducing every itch of the personality to a singular symptom, as though we were algorithmically produced beings.
You can really sense the film, like a woodpecker, chipping away at itself. While Akhtar’s and Kagti’s previous collaborations were content with moralising within the sphere of a character or a family, to make broader claims on the society, at large.
One of the remarkable achievements of Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, however,is that it is, perhaps, one of the first few films that gets what being online is — the texture, the language, the grammar, the obsessions, the rituals that it has.
I wish the film did not find the need to milk what existed in the sensual and frame it with such starched flatness. Sometimes language does not express as much as excrete, and the stench of all that clarity can be a bit nauseating.