Over a period of 11 years in my teens, we as a family moved seven houses. This will be familiar to those who live on rent, with 11-month leases to be renewed at the mercy of the owner. Then, a fortuitous connection that my father made enabled us to stay, again on rent, for 24 years in one house, before we moved to our own six years ago. I say ‘house’ in all three instances. Because, despite the many indelible memories we created as a family, I have always had the feeling that the house in each case, including our own now, has been independent of those memories.

I have never associated memories with a ‘house/home’. Of course, it could be because none of these are a patch on ‘Gulmohar’, the palatial house of the Batras, with its many wings and stairs (as a character says, ‘A house with stairs is a sign of success’ – by which an overwhelming majority of us are ‘unsuccessful’).

The core thought is not mint fresh

Watching Rahul V. Chittella’s Gulmohar on Disney+Hotstar led me to these ‘memories’ of the houses we lived in. When a film does that, makes you go back to aspects of your life, it has worked in some way, made an important connect. Unfortunately, the film cannot help hammering ad nauseam the thought at its core, which to begin with is not mint fresh: what makes a house a home.

The Batra family has resided in one house for 34 years. They are now moving on to separate accommodations and have gathered for a ‘farewell’ get-together. The packers and movers are due the next morning. That not all is kosher with the family dynamics comes across as the evening unfolds, a whispered conversation there, fraught looks exchanged here.

The matriarch Kusum (Sharmila Tagore making a welcome return to cinema 13 years after a film called, interestingly enough, Break Ke Baad) wants one last Holi bash as a family at what all of them have known as ‘home’. Her middle-aged son Arun (Manoj Bajpayee), at the centre of the drama, has issues coping with changes threatening to overwhelm the family.

His wife Indu (Simran) is in a tizzy, working out the logistics of the move as well as dealing with her mother-in-law who clearly has a mind of her own. Their son Aditya (Suraj Sharma) is desperate to break free of his father’s shadow and launch his own app, which makes his relationship with his father frosty. Their daughter Amu (Utsavi Jha), a budding musician, has issues with her love life. Also in the mix are Arun’s first cousins, with the hushed mention of his father’s brother, Sudhakar (Amol Palekar), at the party to which he is not invited, but who will cast a long shadow in the days that follow. And, in a nod to Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, there’s the family help Reshma (Santhy) and the watchman Jeetendra (Jatin Goswami) who engage in a dumb charades version of courtship.

Every actor is splendid, giving away only that much

The opening sequence at the party offers the film’s best moments. Rahul V. Chittella and writer Arpita Mukherjee’s mise en scene captures the simmering layers beneath the surface. In this they are ably aided by cinematographer Eeshit Narain and editor Tanupriya Sharma, the camera flitting from one face to another, the cutting conveying a palpable sense of uncertainty and turmoil underpinning the characters. And every actor is splendid, giving away only that much. Just watch Sharmila Tagore after she announces her intention of moving to Pondicherry, her barely perceptible sigh giving the lie to the composure with which she made it.

The ‘just-this-and not-anymore’ touch that informs the sequence would be a tough act to follow. Till about the hour mark, the film tries valiantly, providing a delectable montage of a family’s lived-in chaos. Indu goes about her work managing the movers and packers, harried, mimicking her mother-in-law, not maliciously, bemoaning her husband’s inability to take a firm stand when it comes to his mother. Aditya and Divya argue behind half-closed doors. The house help serves the family gathered around a table, moving in and out of snippets of conversation.

The script is perceptive enough about its characters’ quirks. Take Arun, for example. He has not reconciled himself even to the change of Gurgaon to Gurugram which enables us to understand his resistance to the changes overtaking the family. Or, in a splendid sequence when, in a hotel room, he tells Indu that his mobile phone is switched off because it has run out of battery, and Indu responds how ‘lame’ an excuse it is, for a man who puts his phone on recharge when it still has 70 per cent charge available.

The writing gets lazy after the ‘big’ reveal midway

After the film’s ‘big’ reveal midway through (not quite the earth-shaking revelation it is made to be, in the first place), the narrative goes nowhere, caught as it is in an endless loop of house-home-room-photo album-memory meditations. Every character is engaged in expository homilies on family, life, change and status quo. The filmmakers are hell-bent on spelling out every character response and motivation. Consider Kusum’s confrontation with Sudhakar – a seemingly never-ending series of voiceovers bringing together the character threads. Or Arun meeting the old man (Vinod Nagpal) at the teashop on the other side of the road (the director is at pains to communicate that it has taken Arun a lifetime to cross the divide), who goes into his own sermonising.

If the telling instead of showing is not bad enough, the writing gets plain lazy. Adi’s wife Divya (Kaveri Seth) barges into the job interview he is having. Really? If that was not laughably bad, the closure that Amu gets thanks to her grandmother’s understanding is too pat and underwhelming, with Kusum’s flashback an unnecessary digression. The intercuts in the end – one between Kusum and her granddaughter, the next involving Adi and Divya, and the third between Indu and Arun – are all tonally identical. And sticking out like a sore thumb, like yesterday’s leftover, the track between the house help and the watchman (with a Muslim suitor for Reshma thrown into the mix too) which aims for and has nothing of the verve of the Vijay Raaz-Tillotama Shome track in Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding.

It could have been so much more

Given the actors at work here, it is not difficult to like the proceedings. Just watching Sharmila Tagore break into a jig at the Holi festivity is worth the two hours’ runtime. Manoj Bajpayee is spot-on with every expression, understated and nuanced, lending great dignity to the character (you can see how the writing fails him in the teashop sequence, his grimace almost saying: ‘You have made your point, now move on’). It is, however, Simran who steals the show with a terrific turn as the loving wife, the stressed mother, the exasperated daughter-in-law.

Unfortunately, the writing never rises to what these actors are capable of. In the end, as author and humorist Krishna Shastri Devulapalli told me over a conversation, it is ‘a lovely film that is essentially about rich people being sentimental about their real estate, with a couple of poor people thrown in to tell us their problems matter, too.’ It could have been so much more. But then as Kusum says in the movie, this is what it was probably ‘meant to be’.

(Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri is a film and music buff, editor, publisher, film critic and writer)