BOLLYWOOD’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS MARRIED ACTRESSES WHO ARE MOTHERS / COLUMN PUBLISHED ON BBC HINDI

(This is the English version of an article published on bbc.com/hindi/ on October 21, 2015.)

MOMS MUST BE MOMS BUT DADS WILL BE BOYS

Though Bollywood is marginally less resistant to married actresses now, it still insists on giving only certain kinds of roles to women post-marriage and post-motherhood

By Anna MM Vetticad

A decade back, chances are she would have been the hero’s or heroine’s mother. Today, she is the heroine herself.

As trade analysts collate the collections of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s Jazbaa, there is more to discuss than money. In an industry that is notoriously disinterested in women post-30, post-marriage and post-babies, Jazbaa – terribly flawed though it is – is a milestone of sorts. After all, how often does Bollywood give the central character in a mainstream film to a 41-year-old married actress returning after a five-year hiatus during which she had a child? This is particularly heartening, coming as it does after a then-49-year-old Sridevi hit the box-office bull’s eye with English Vinglish in 2012 following a 15-year break, and Madhuri Dixit had a moderate success with Dedh Ishqiya last year.

All three stories revolve around their female protagonists. There is a catch though. While an increasingly experimental Bollywood has become marginally less resistant to married actresses in the past decade, it still gives these women limited choices.

For instance, the industry seems determined that real-life mothers must play mothers on screen if they want to be leading ladies. Ash in Jazbaa, Sri in English Vinglish, Kajol in her post-baby films and Madhuri in Aaja Nachle have all been mums in roles that have given centrality to their motherhood. Dedh Ishqiya had an explanation for why Madhuri’s character was childless.

This is not to say that these have been inadequate roles or that on-screen motherhood is undesirable. Quite to the contrary. But where is the variety? Where are the frothy romances starring these actresses, the comedies or stories of feisty older women who are not married and not mothers?

Meanwhile, their male peers are picking from a range of genres and roles, singing and dancing as singletons and husbands, sometimes fathers but most often not, usually laughably younger than their real-life age and courting actresses two decades their junior. With older heroines though, care is taken that their characters match their real-life age, have significant gravitas and that actors around their age play their romantic partners.

Producers insist this is what viewers want. The truth though is they don’t give viewers an alternative, the biggest budgets are still earmarked for male-centric entertainers, major male stars usually don’t want to act with women even close to their age (49-year-old Shah Rukh Khan’s repeated pairing with Kajol, 41, being an exception) and the options offered to older actresses reflect Bollywood’s own narrow-mindedness.

The prevailing mindset is best illustrated by a conversation I had with director Deepak Shivdasani before the release of his film Yeh Raaste Hai Pyaar Ke (2001) starring Madhuri, Ajay Devgn and Preity Zinta. When I asked if Madhuri’s role in the film suited her stardom, he misunderstood. “Don’t worry,” he assured me, “I’ve given her a role that suits the dignity of a married woman.”

Fourteen years later, at least two critics last week felt the need to assure us in reviews that Aishwarya’s role in Jazbaa is “age appropriate”. Yet the press barely protests when men touching 50 play 20- and 30-somethings.

Well, Bollywood producers, writers, directors and journalists are not living in a social vacuum. Like the rest of us, they emerge from our patriarchal society that by and large believes marriage elevates a woman’s stature and expects wives to subordinate their dreams to their spouses’ and children’s needs. It goes without saying that in such an industry, women will have limited options.

They deserve more, but until they get it, every baby step Bollywood takes towards Aishwarya, Madhuri, Sridevi and their ilk is a step worth toasting.

(Anna MM Vetticad is the author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. Twitter: @annavetticad)

BBC Hindi link:

http://www.bbc.com/hindi/india/2015/10/151018_married_bollywood_heroine_tk?ocid=socialflow_twitter

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aishwarya_Rai_Bachchan

Note: This photograph was not sourced from BBC Hindi

FILM FATALE: HOMOSEXUALITY IN BOLLYWOOD / COLUMN PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

Headline: STOP WINKING

Introline: Bollywood, don’t represent homosexuality through contempt, innuendo and silence

Salaam: Dedh Ishqiya does not make a song and dance about its heroines' lesbian relationship

“So Karan Johar is completely out of the closet!” a friend wrote on Facebook this week. She was referring to an episode of the talk show Koffee With Karan in which KJo proposed a double date to his guests Anushka Sharma and Anurag Kashyap: he with Kashyap, Sharma with her boyfriend. Coming out? Not really. The double date suggestion is just an addition to a long history of gay jokes, hints and innuendo from and about Bollywood’s most-famously-assumed-to-be-but-never-officially-confirmed-to-be-homosexual filmmaker on the television programme he hosts.

Of Mumbai’s many directors who are rumoured to be gay, Johar alone has fuelled speculation about himself with those never-ending gags on his show. Many in the LGBT community also see the gay comedy in several of his films as playing to the gallery in the interests of his bank balance, contributing to the mockery of an already ridiculed people. Onir — arguably Bollywood’s only openly gay filmmaker — outrightly condemned Johar when I interviewed him in 2012 for my book. “It’s absolutely okay not to do films with gay characters but don’t do the opposite where you harm your own community,” he said.

The point is no one has a right to demand that Johar publicly acknowledge his sexual preferences. Coming out is a difficult, intensely personal decision; maybe he’s not gay, maybe he is, either way it’s not our business. However, it does impact a serious cause when he joins most of Bollywood in persistently referring to homosexuality — both off and on screen — with contempt, clichés, wink-wink-nudge-nudge humour or at best, silence.

Celina Jaitley has been an exceptional, pro-gay voice from mainstream Bollywood for years now. Shortly after the Supreme Court’s December 2013 ruling upholding the criminalisation of homosexual sex under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, Imran Khan starred in a satirical video reviling prevailing prejudices about homosexuality. Both stars go against their industry’s long-standing norms, typified by Amitabh Bachchan’s reaction to this question from a viewer on a television show I hosted just a few years back: which male star would he like cast opposite him in a remake of Dostana (the Abhishek Bachchan-John Abraham-starrer about two men pretending to be gay)? Bachchan Senior passed the question. When Section 377 was incessantly in the news though in end-2013, he voluntarily — even if ambiguously — addressed the court ruling on his blog.

If a septuagenarian Bachchan can marginally overcome his unease with the subject, possibly because of the recent media discussions on gay rights, then imagine the impact on young film-goers if mainstream Bollywood were to routinely give us non-stereotypical gay characters with an everydayness to them — anyone whose homosexuality is neither a cause for mirth nor a major plot point in the film, but a mere circumstance not meriting comment.

Abhishek Chaubey’s Dedh Ishqiya is a milestone in that respect. Unlike most mainstream Bollywood productions that serve up homosexuals who are limp-wristed, lecherous and/or comical men, this film’s same-sex lovers are not stereotyped and — wonder of wonders! — they are women. Unlike Onir’s ground-breaking My Brother Nikhil and a segment in his omnibus I Am (both empathetic gems), Dedh Ishqiya is not an issue-based story with homosexuality as a central theme either. That Madhuri Dixit and Huma Qureshi play lesbians is a revelation made in passing in the film, without a snigger or a snort.

So it turns out the situation is not without hope. Johar himself directed a restrained even if flawed short feature about a gay man in 2013’s four-film anthology Bombay Talkies. Now comes news that Ekta Kapoor is producing a Romeo and Juliet with a gay spin. Back in 2005, Kapoor’s Kyaa Kool Hai Hum featured Bobby Darling in one of Hindi cinema’s crudest portrayals ever of an LGBT person. Her new film is a chance to compensate for that travesty. Question is: does she care enough to want to redeem herself?

(The writer is the author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. Follow Anna M.M. Vetticad on Twitter @annavetticad)

(Note: This column was first published in The Hindu Businessline’s BL Ink supplement on February 15, 2014)

Photograph courtesy: Facebook.com/dedhishqiya

REVIEW 239: DEDH ISHQIYA

Release date:	January 10, 2014
Director:	Abhishek Chaubey
Cast: Language:	Madhuri Dixit-Nene, Naseeruddin Shah, Arshad Warsi, Huma Qureshi, Vijay Raaz, Manoj Pahwa Hindi/Urdu

Dedh Ishqiya is like the Urdu language: pleasing to the ear and apparently polite to a fault irrespective of the views and emotions being expressed. In precisely the same vein, this film is soaked in seeming indolence, its visual exquisiteness undisturbed at all times despite the lava bubbling below the surface in the lives of its female leads.

DI is set in Mahmudabad in Uttar Pradesh where Babban (Arshad Warsi) and Khaalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) converge to fall in love once again, in this sequel to the 2010 Vidya Balan-Naseer-Arshad-starrer Ishqiya. That one was about deception in love, a duplicitous woman and two gullible men. In a sense, the theme continues as Khaalu is smitten by Begum Para (Madhuri Dixit-Nene), the widow of the late Nawab of Mahmudabad, and Babban is besotted by her companion Muniya (Huma Qureshi). Para’s husband wanted her to remarry so she’s holding a swayamvar in the guise of a mushaira where the wily Khaalu lands up as a poet. The question though is this: who is the deceiver here? Are the men being taken for a ride by the women, or by one woman as they were by the seductress Krishna (Vidya) in Ishqiya? Or are they wiser from that experience?

Nothing in this film is what it seems. Not even the genre. It’s a thriller, yet it stubbornly refuses to be frenetic, revealing its cards one step at a time, at its very own pace, as if teasing the viewer or cajoling us to forget that there might be another twist coming up.

The cast is an assembly of formidable talents. Arshad is his usual brilliant self here, playing the naïve scamp like a second skin. Naseer-saab has done too many films in the past decade that are an embarrassment to his CV but here he proves yet again that when he invests his heart and soul in a role, there are few to match him. Besides, his chemistry with Arshad is to die for.

And what does one say of Madhuri? In her first film after seven years, Ms Megawatt Smile challenges her remarkable acting skills the way she rarely did in the first leg of her career. That she has a luminous face is without question. Age has added a charming chubbiness to those cheeks. It has also given her immense dignity and elegance. She is a picture of grace in her dancing scenes. Over and above this though is the effortlessness with which she gives Begum Para an almost tangible fragility and frailty, the sort of air that would make any man – or woman – want to protect her. Huma Qureshi is a bit of a disappointment though. She doesn’t fully inhabit her role as she has in her earlier films and is somewhat put in the shade by the veterans here. To be fair, hers is the least-fleshed-out, most poorly written part of the four.

The most scintillating performance of the lot comes from the amazing Vijay Raaz as Para’s ardent suitor Jaan Mohammad. It’s a joy here to watch his body language, conveying by turns the swagger of a rich man and the vulnerability of a fellow who believes that all the wealth in the world can’t give him “the DNA of a Nawab”, as one character puts it. I’ve never imagined myself saying this about him, but he looks almost dishy in this film.

Jaan Mohammad exemplifies the nuances in the screenplay by Abhishek Chaubey (who has directed both Ishqiyas) and Vishal Bhardwaj. Despite the humour and thrills, the writing is replete with understated comments on class differences, feudalism, loneliness in marriage, second chances in life, male bonding and, in ways alien to mainstream Hindi cinema, female bonding. In a brief aside, we even have a new policeman in town, SP John Vijay, who speaks with a pronounced accent but is that rare southern Indian character in a Hindi film who has not been included to emphasise his “Madrasi”-ness but simply because (though most of Bollywood seems not to realise this) south Indians too exist in India.

The film’s art design and costumes are ravishing, epitomised by that scene in which Begum Para first breaks into a dance in solitude. DoP Setu’s camera gives us a thoroughly atmospheric film, playing with light, shade, shadow and darkness with such skill as to make even a dusty, dilapidated, decaying haveli look picturesque. His favourite canvases though, seem to be the faces of Naseer and Madhuri, both of whose loveliness is highlighted by repeated extreme close-ups. Also a must-mention is A. Sreekar Prasad’s editing which merges night with day and day with night, with each scene seeming to flow into the next.

Where Dedh compares unfavourably to Ishqiya is in the music department. Clinton Cerejo’s background score complements Setu’s cinematography. Vishal’s songs, though melodic and introspective to match the film’s overall tone, don’t offer us anything as throbbingly memorable as the earlier film’s Dil to bachcha hai ji and Ibn Battuta.

Ishqiya was all fire and ice and “chutiyam sulphate”-style dialoguebaazi teamed with that blazing passion between Krishna and the men. It was a fun and unusual film but in the ultimate analysis, the elements didn’t all come together to form a wholesome whole. Dedh Ishqiya demands a different frame of mind. It is poetic and lilting and leisurely, not just in terms of the mood it creates but also in the dulcet verses by Bashir Badr scattered throughout and its heavily Urdu dialogues (written by Vishal) with which characters sound like they’re making love even when they’re stabbing each other in the back. Except for one incongruous chap called Noor Mohammed Itaalvi (played by Manoj Pahwa) and the far-from-enthralling climactic gun battle, the film rarely strikes a false note. This perhaps is why its two-and-a-half hours running time doesn’t feel like that much time at all.

The title Dedh Ishqiya sounds so much cleverer than Ishqiya 2. No deep meaning there, as is evident from the team’s jestful comments in the media. As it turns out, the choice of title is appropriate too since this film is a standalone achievement, superior in quality to Ishqiya, thus going way beyond so many Hollywood and Bollywood sequels that come across as lazy efforts to cash in on an already-successful brand name. Underlining how different the film is from so much of what Bollywood creates these days, Dedh Ishqiya ends with its best song, Hamari atariya, accompanying the credits picturised on Madhuri’s classical dance moves. So un-Mauja-Mauja-like, one can’t help thinking. I didn’t move from my seat till the very last shot. Abhishek Chaubey has arrived, people! And Madhuri is back!

Rating (out of five): ***1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	152 minutes

Poster courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedh_Ishqiya