ESSAY: From Midnight Cowboy to Kaminey

THE BALLAD OF CHARLIE AND MIKHAIL

THE buddy film, so eagerly lapped up by queer audiences in the past, has in recent times been ‘found out’. In the past, these films provided a gay subtext that overpowered everything else going on on-screen, a subtext that, although almost snatched from the proceedings, had become the inexorable parables for the lives of gay men. What they were led to believe was that being embroiled in a strong self-sacrificing friendship could be a viable stand-in for a love match. This kind of cinema turned out to be the albatross around their necks that inhibited them from venturing into untested waters as gay men who wanted more than just the idea of another man as a heroic counterpart, but men in the flesh, who could be losers or slime-balls, men who were the objects of their carnal desire and a kind of adoration that wasn’t quite the stuff of epic films, men who gave them love-bites and nothing else besides, things that they hadn’t quite seen on celluloid. In this, the buddy films and their unflinching devotion to them have become somewhat anachronistic as gay men slowly learnt, without any help from popular culture, that love needed no surrogates. Gestures were more important than nuance and that stories of homosexual love needed no longer be seen as merely fine print, or be read only between the lines.

However, by the same token, when a film is sent out on its way, audiences respond to it in their very own innate ways, interpreting what they see with what they know. Last year, a new ‘buddy’ film created waves on the Indian box-office. There are movie-goers who are ever ready to thumb down anything that requires them to not suspend the suspension of disbelief that they have become so accustomed to, but despite the nay-sayers, Vishal Bharadwaj’s Kaminey provides us with gritty filmi noir, a motley crew of gangsters who are at once chilling and amusing, conflicted twins played by a charismatic leading man (as the credits roll, you half-expect Shahid Kapoor to get double billing), and a vengeful Marathi mulgi played zestfully by Priyanka Chopra. Even though we are now wary of ‘subtext’, the sheer beauty of the film’s central relationship between petty swindlers Charlie (Kapoor) and Mikhail (Chandan Roy Sanyal) has caused much talk about this being essentially a ‘gay film’, ripe for a harvest of queer pickings. In his TV interviews, Mr Bharadwaj claims to have been unaware of such a dynamic between the players, but indeed, there is sometimes a great impasse between what a filmmaker intends, and what is ultimately taken home from a viewing, especially by an audience as hungry for representation, and therefore, as nitpickingly discerning as a queer one.

In the film, Charlie is the twin who seems to have crossed over to the dark side, brooking no favors as he sets resolutely upon becoming a bookie with his own counter at the races. He is taken in by a gang of arms-dealing Bengali brothers, the youngest of whom is the curiously named Mikhail. As they grow up together they develop a kinship that plays out rather combustibly on screen. When they greet each other it’s with whoops and kisses, head-butts and cuddles. They engage themselves as rivals in play but partners at work. When Charlie chances upon his ticket to the big time—a stash of high-grade cocaine stuffed into a guitar case—and breaks the news to Mikhail, then, after a skirmish involving fists and shoves, they wrestle in more than genial fashion on the floor, Mikhail on a high from the snorting, transgressing Charlie’s physical space. Charlie seems awkward and guiltily aware of the intimacy but doesn’t pull away, as he revels in consorting with the person he considers his significant other, even though he’d probably never articulate it as such, even to himself. This leads to the film’s only big production number Dhan te naan, where we are spared pole-dancing item girls and costume changes, but are instead treated to a celebration of male bonding, of chummy respect placed on some kind of pedestal. If anyone has seen the original video that was produced for Dhan te naan (years ago, when it was meant for a TV special), replete with virile young men whose macho posturing finds expression in a series of deftly executed pelvic thrusts timed to pistol shots, you’d be forgiven for believing that this was always intended to be a gay anthem that derives much of its energy from pulsating homoerotic overtones. 

It helps that the story of the twins themselves, as brothers, as two halves, hasn’t really been fully developed in Kaminey, and only seems to function as a Shakespearean plot device around which the comedy of errors pivots itself. It’s as if Mikhail is the brother Charlie never had, but he loves him in a more awkward and self-conscious fashion, indebted to the Bengali brothers for having accepted him, as an abandoned changeling, into their fold, yet totally buying in on the idea idea that he would be ready to risk everything for him in life and in death, as shown in the climatic scene where the sight of Mikhail’s dead body draws from him a singularly overwrought moan, and he consigns to the flames the stash of drugs that all the goonies are negotiating upon in tragic-comic fashion. A subtle touch in the end shows Charlie naming his bookie-counter Mikhail & Co., after his deceased ‘beau’. Although he has now acquired a trophy girlfriend with the anglicized name, a marker for the kind of trappings that good fortune brings you, his life force still stems from this other most significant relationship, and queer audiences wonder why this kind of love should be called by any other name. 

This ethos finds eerie prescience in the mafia drama Eastern Promises (2007). It isn’t hard to imagine the bhadralog brothers of Kaminey as standing in for the Russian brotherhood depicted in the Cronenberg film (and indeed, in others of its ilk) as consisting of art collectors, master chefs or generally, repositories of high culture. Mikhail is a Russian name, and the uneasy kinship between the heir-apparent Kirril (Vincent Cassel) and the mobster-driver Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), with its own politics of repression in an overtly patriarchal set-up, offsets the organic rhythm of the ballad of Charlie and Mikhail. In one scene, the obviously closeted Kirril forces Nikolai to prove he isn’t a faggot by forcing him to fornicate with a whore. In Kaminey, set in notoriously homo-social India, the ambiguity of love, and of touch, doesn’t need to be slaughtered in this manner—there is no need to underscore the usual line, “I ain’t no queer!”

Perhaps the film to which it actually owes a cinematic debt is John Schlesinger’s under-rated classic, Midnight Cowboy (1969). Here, Ratso and Joe, characters etched perfectly by actors Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight respectively, create a poignant dynamic between two men who’ve learned to care hopelessly about each other while still resisting the labels that may be thrown at them by people eager to categorize. Shifty-eyed Ratso, with his shuffling gait and limp (homosexual coding for the time, much like Charlie’s lisp in Kaminey), yearns for a future in Vegas where he’ll pimp for his gigolo Joe, and they’d be on the payroll of rich women, and live happily ever after. Like in the case of Charlie’s bookie counter, such futures can sometimes only be realized at the cost of a life. In the world of formula Hindi films, where once a triangle of two women and a man meant that one lassie would have to take a bullet to her heart, maybe we’ve grown to a point, where if there are now two men, one of them has to die. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter that these men may have been straight. By flirting with something that they did not fully comprehend, by allowing themselves some time in this queer dimension, they have enriched their own lives, and that of others.

This article first appeared in the latest issue of Bombay Dost, India's only registered LGBT publication. Issues can be purchased online at www.bombaydost.co.in