‘Ghich Pich’ Movie Review: A Bittersweet Slice-Of-Life ‘Mindie’

In this streaming era, I’m suspicious about stories set in the 1990s and early 2000s. When nostalgia becomes the only selling point, it’s hard to enjoy the curated slice-of-life-ness. I’m also wary of the term ‘Mindie’ (mainstream+indie): a tonal signifier of low-budget productions with a commercial pitch. Ankur Singla’s Ghich Pich (a colloquial term for “emotional turmoil”) is a Mindie marinating in post-liberalisation nostalgia. The year is 2001, the setting is Chandigarh. Posters of Chandrachur Singh, Sonali Bendre and Shawn Michaels dot the coming-of-age narrative of three teen friends in the late-night-drives and single-ring-on-landline phase of their lives. Board exams are around the corner; middle partings, blissful ignorance (“I’ve heard it spreads through eye contact,” whispers a kid about homosexuality), pre-digital innocence (“Kiss? No, my love for her is pure,” a boy declares) and letters inked in blood are all the rage.  

It’s true that the antiquity of a younger India — a simpler, softer one — is the protagonist. But what sets Ghich Pich apart from new-age nostalgia fatigue is the film-maker’s affection for a time and place that no longer exists. The film doesn’t unfold through the lens of hindsight or melancholy. It is present and alive to its period, liberated from the reverse-engineered designs of unlearning the trappings of the social media generation. The specificity is universal, too. The city may be Chandigarh, but even another Tier-2 native like myself might find that our memories and adolescence are spiritual siblings. It always fascinates me when I see childhoods and vignettes of similar social strata resembling each other. That’s what good textural storytelling does — it blurs the lines between experience and perception. I’ve met these people without knowing them.  

The conflicts and resolutions of three arcs run parallel to one another. Anurag (Aryan Rana) is stuck in his own Udaan (2010); a strict father (Satyajit Sharma) offers empty philosophical maps, uses fear as a motivator, and pushes him to study harder and cut out any hormonal distractions. Budding cricketer Gurpreet (Kabir Nanda) is infatuated with a classmate, and much to his orthodox Sikh parents’ horror, plans to quit his turban and cut his hair to compete for her attention. Gaurav (Shhivam Kakar) is the slacker with family-business rhythms, but he is thrown into a tailspin when he spots his father kissing another man. They all have their ‘problems’ at home, but when they’re together, there’s an intangible sense of finality. They don’t realise it, but this is perhaps the last summer before the past transitions into the future.  

There are a few symptoms of debut-director syndrome. Like the awkward staging of a scene in which a man chokes up and tells his wife that “I’ve done my job” on discovering that their son has run away. It isn’t clear if he’s sad, ashamed or proud. It’s the sort of moment that’s derived from previous movies (the ‘M’ in Mindie) rather than life itself. The writing struggles to juggle the separate lives; some journeys get more screen-time than others. But overall, Ghich Pich is elevated by a stellar cast. The three young actors do a fine job of blending into the environment while standing out. Of the older ones, the formidable Geeta Agrawal Sharma continues her streak of being one of modern Hindi cinema’s great criers. As the wife of a closeted man, she nails the inbred empathy of a woman who trades the societal impositions of love for platonic companionship. You can tell that she’s ‘settled’ for a nice guy with a secret after noticing the patriarchal marriages around her. Usually, such characters protect their kids from the husband, but here, she’s protecting the husband from the rest of the world. It’s a moving subversion of the middle-class homes we grow up in and the complicity of silence.  

As her husband and Gaurav’s father, the late Nitesh Pandey (from Khosla ka Ghosla) delivers a poignant performance. Not once does he overdo the hidden ‘femininity’ of the man’s body language. The signs are normalised. All it takes is a fondness for dancing at weddings and being a little more expressive, in stark contrast to the stoic dads in the locality. Some of the best moments of the film feature his shame and desperation around his immature boy — he is afraid that he’s being viewed as a lesser person, not a lesser man. 

That’s another thing Ghich Pich does well. Given that it’s set more than two decades ago, it doesn’t judge the families. Just because Gaurav’s parents are different (and braver), the others are not frowned upon for the sake of political correctness. Gurpreet’s god-fearing father is devastated about his son’s erasure of identity. In most other films, the elders’ regressive traditions would have been pitted against the boys’ progressive rebellion. A side would be picked. But there is no right and wrong in this film; it’s more about a battle for acceptance and belonging within the confines of a 2002 state of mind. It stays authentic to the linearity of evolution without getting into the morality of living. For better or worse, this is how folks thought back then. They are who they are; there’s no point scrutinising their desires through the lens of internet-age wokeness. For some, the crackling sound of an FM radio channel on an interstate bus crossing borders might signal a new beginning: one of big-city hope and promise. For others, the fading slumber of the town left behind might signal a tragic ending: one of parent-pressured exits and borrowed spirit. It’s always a matter of perspective — and time.