Recently, there were these two movies I watched back to back on an OTT platform. Of course, there’s nothing new in the fact that OTT movies have started making content the king. But to what extent? That’s something I realised while watching these movies. ‘Kho Gaye Hum Kahan’ and ‘Three Of Us’: these were the two movies that I was referring to above.
At the first glance, besides both movies exploring the plot of their story through three protagonists, one might not find any shocking similarities in them. But once you have finished going through the roller coaster of emotions that the stories make you experience, you start noticing the glaring commonality.
Let’s begin with the first movie – Kho Gaye Hum Kahan. As a part of what the millennials call “Gen-Z,” it makes you go through a mild existential crisis. For those of you who have the facility of checking the number of hours you spent on your phone in a week’s time – I am sure, this movie made you check it and wonder about your purpose in life. It’s a simple story that explores the friendship between a trio that’s grown up together and understands the complexities of relationships in this day. While that may sound like a usual evening’s conversation with your parents over a cuppa, there is a lot more to it.
We live in a world where the dictionary for terms describing a relation between two individuals has gotten heavier than the meaning that these relations hold in the first place. And the presence of digital media has only made that slope more slippery over time. But what’s new there? Every generation has always complained about their next one being frivolous with regards to relationships, and the blame mostly goes to the medium of communication advancing – letters, telephones, messages, emails, and now dating apps.
This movie portrays the extent to which people today are ready to believe everything they see online, irrespective of their knowledge about the reality. And it makes you wonder what society has come down to. So is there no hope left for us? No. That’s what this movie reflects. The lines differentiating reel from the real have definitely started getting blurry, but it hasn’t completely faded yet. One just needs to identify and acknowledge that the boundary exists.
And speaking of faded realities, brings me to our next movie – Three Of Us. A movie that has several layers of emotions that a middle-class family goes through in real life. The protagonist, who suffers from an early onset of dementia, craves to go back to her roots, maybe one last time before she forgets its very existence. It’s a simple narrative, alternating between the three protagonists – one who is suffering from the fear of forgetting it all, her husband who, in a desperate attempt to keep her assured of his support, agrees to go for a trip down her memory lane, and her childhood friend who accompanies them on the journey.
The film captures a hard-to-swallow pill of all our lives in the process. It is the fact that we are so engrossed in the mundane routines of our lives that we forget the experiences we have been through, the memories we have made, and the people we have made them with. It brings this message via a contrast between the hustling life of a metro city like Mumbai and the simplicity retained in the Konkani town of Vengurla. But at the end of the day, the physical environment isn’t the factor. It is our own minds that we are trapped in which makes us believe that if we don’t continue living our daily lives, we will be running behind. But what do you do when the same mind starts failing you instead of pushing you ahead in the race?
Such complex realities have been explored so simply and genuinely in both these movies that it makes you think and reflect on your own lives, no matter which age group or generation you belong to. Whether it is the OTT formula of making content the king or the powerful performances of each of the cast members in these films, it indeed is difficult to determine. But what remains at the end of the day is to take a pause. Look around you and acknowledge the physical environment you are in, the emotional companionship that has brought you so far in your life, and appreciate the memories and experiences you have been through. That is what makes you, YOU. It’s ironic that I am writing this piece on a platform that I am warning you against, but I am ready to bear the cost of being hypocritical. That’s what my takeaway has been after all from these two films – it’s important to be selfish at times and allow it to be so at the cost of consuming all that is happening around in the world through the reel lens of this media.
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