Film Impressions

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.

LIST: 100 Queer Films of India (Part 4)

CONTINUED FROM PART 3

Saawariya (2007) Hindi, dir. by Sanjay Leela Bhansali with Ranbir Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor

In this homage to one of Indian film’s greatest showmen, Bhansali trains Raj Kapoor’s voyeuristic gaze away from women cavorting in waterfalls, and on to his grandson, in a highly sexualised towel-dance on a window sill that’s lit to highlight the lithe young actor’s erogenous zones, although it would appear only American audiences have been allowed the extended shot of his derrière. In one fell sweep, the director evokes Simi Garewal in Mera Naam Joker, Rishi Kapoor in Bobby (the original Bollywood butt-shot) and maybe even Dimple’s wardrobe malfunction from Saagar, who knows, who cares?

LIST: 100 Queer Films of India (Part 3)

CONTINUED FROM PART 2

Mera Naam Joker (1970) Hindi, dir. by Raj Kapoor with Raj Kapoor, Padmini

Features a third act in which we are introduced to petty thug Minoo Master (Padmini) who passes as a man, but is exposed as a woman (quite literally) after an ill-judged stunt performance involving knives. Later, Raj Kapoor (as Raju the Joker) himself turns in a gender-bending act as a flamboyantly effeminate qawwal, a perverse allusion to being cuckolded when Minoo falls for a dashing film star (Rajendra Kumar). Ultimately the Joker’s dysfunction in his relationship with women, and his uneasiness about his sexual trysts, could be a symptom of his repressed cravings. Indeed, the young Joker’s (Rishi Kapoor) burgeoning sexuality is fraught with guilt and trepidation, rather than the exuberance of erotic discovery, as if he were being dragged to the slaughter, forced to conform to standards of behaviour not in keeping with his own possibly queer disposition.

LIST: 100 Queer Films of India (Part 2)

CONTINUED FROM PART 1

Fire (1996) English, dir. by Deepa Mehta with Nandita Das, Shabana Azmi

Decried by gay activists as a film depicting ‘situational’ lesbians, Fire is rather less simplistic in its treatment of two women trapped in loveless marriages who ‘discover’ one another. The illicit affair is fraught with the underpinings of guilt and self-loathing, but there is mirth and exuberance, as in the scene where Sita (Das) cross-dresses and lip-synchs to the Hemant Kumar number Aaja Zara while Radha (Azmi) plays the demure ingénue, and also compassion when Radha breaks her sister-in-law’s Karwa Chauth fast, and looks upon her, newly empowered. These are women conditioned to traditional notions of home and hearth, who can now feel the shackles of repression slip away through the forbidden pleasure of their love for each other.

LIST: 100 Queer Films of India (Part 1)

With Kashish, the first international queer film festival of its kind, currently underway in Mumbai (see MQFF201) here's a good time to look back at how Indian cinema (both in India and the diaspora worldwide) has represented the queer people of India over the ages. I had originally compiled this Alternative Guide to Cinema as part of the April 2009 issue of Bombay Dost magazine, India's first and only registered LGBT publication, issues of which can be purchased online.

68 Pages (2007) Hindi, dir. by Sridhar Rangayan with Mouli Ganguly, Joy Sengupta, Jayati Bhatia

68 pages of an AIDS counselor’s diary draw out the hidden stories of India’s most repressed, through compelling narratives featuring as its dramatis personae — sex workers, bar dancers and gay men, in life-size avatars, who persist with their lives doggedly despite the odds being stacked against them in a society that’s far from egalitarian. While wearing its agenda on its sleeve, the film plays out as an evocative melodrama rather than merely a public awareness infomercial about AIDS and safe sex.