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 247: QUEEN

Release date:	March 7, 2014
Director:	Vikas Bahl
Cast: Language:	Kangna Ranaut, Lisa Haydon, Rajkumar Rao Hindi

And THIS, my dear Bollywood, is how it’s done!

Director Vikas Bahl’s Queen is a slap in the face of every Hindi filmmaker and analyst who continues to insist that women-centric films can’t be light-hearted entertainers; that socially conscious films can’t be fun; that “thoughtful” and “hilarious” are mutually exclusive qualities for films. It also comes as a relief to all those who’ve been waiting for Kangna Ranaut to deliver on the promise she showed when she first entered Bollywood. Playing Rani Mehra – a woman ditched at the altar by her obnoxiously controlling MCP fiancé – Ranaut pulls out all the stops to show us what a nuanced performer she can be, given the right role and director.

Queen’s Rani is an ultra-conservative young woman from Delhi’s Rajouri Garden, whose protected upbringing belies her family’s quiet liberalism that we discover as the film rolls along. When her fiancé Vijay (Rajkumar Rao) decides he’s too good for her just hours before their wedding, she is at first crushed but then decides to take off on her own on the honeymoon she had planned for both of them. For a woman whose family has rarely let her out of their sight until then, Paris-in-solitude followed by Amsterdam are more than mere adventures.

Far removed from the watchful gaze of her loved ones, the strictures of the demanding ex-fiance and the constraints of living among one’s own, Rani bonds with a kind-hearted and promiscuous half-Indian female hotel employee, befriends a multi-cultural trio of gentlemen, learns to take care of herself, discovers the difference between a protective buddy and a suffocating boyfriend, realises that men outside the family circle are not necessarily predators, meets male strangers who are more genuine than female kin, gets an inkling of the career she could have, and kisses a cute Italian. The scenarios are all so real, uniformly sweet, inspiring, comical and bereft of clichés, that we must doff a hat to all the writers involved: story and screenplay – Parveez Shaikh, Chaitally Parmar, Vikas Bahl himself; dialogues – Anvita Dutt, Kangna Ranaut. More than anything else, they must be lauded for not dictating definitions of liberalism and conservatism, and for the non-judgmental tone they adopt towards Rani’s friends in Europe, neither glorifying nor condemning their lifestyles, simply telling it like it is.

Although Queen travels the world with Rani, cinematographer Bobby Singh sticks to the mood of the film: instead of sweeping shots of the cities our heroine visits, he opts for intimate views of the spaces she occupies. Even the costume design by Rushi Sharma and Manoshi Nath is steeped in the subtlety that pervades the entire film. By the end of the story, Rani has acquired a sophistication that is not brought about by an overly dramatic alteration to her wardrobe (no, she does not jump from salwar suits to minuscule skirts); it comes from a shining inner confidence manifesting itself in marginal changes in her style.

At the centre of it all is Kangna Ranaut. As Rani swings between reticence and confidence, Ranaut communicates her character’s confusion and evolution in a manner that’s astoundingly sincere, effective and low-key. Her face has always managed to convey subtle emotions. The thick-voiced dialogue delivery that has been the bane of her performances so far has improved greatly. That voice gives way just once in this film, in a scene in Amsterdam when she yells at Vijay. This is, without a doubt, Ranaut’s most well-written and well-acted role till date.

Casting directors Atul Mongia and Parita Mandalia have picked actors for the smaller parts too with attention to detail. Rajkumar Rao gets limited screen time yet manages to dig his heels into the role of Vijay, a man in love yet too selfish to rise above his patriarchal mindset for the woman he loves. Model Lisa Haydon is a revelation as the other Vijay in Rani’s life, or rather, Vijaylakshmi the hotel staffer who guides Rani through her time in Paris. What a sparkling performance, Ms Haydon. Vijaylakshmi’s interactions with Rani also give us that rare instance of girl bonding in a Bollywood film.

Of the bit-part players, it’s hard not to be charmed by sweet-looking Mich Boyko as the graffiti artist in Amsterdam or to be drawn to Marco Canadea’s emotional, arrogant, over-wrought, attractive Italian chef. It would have been nice to know just that tad bit more though about Guithob Joseph’s musician Tim, especially because black actors are rarely seen in Hindi films (Bollywood’s idea of “foreigners” tends to be white folk) but that’s a wish, not a grievance. The film’s only truly false note comes from the Muslim prostitute in Amsterdam whose heavily Urdu-laden dialogues seem to flow awkwardly off her tongue.

Vikas Bahl earlier co-directed Chillar Party, which was nice in parts but so-so elsewhere.  Queen, on the other hand, is a thoroughly accomplished film. Bahl’s understanding of a woman’s psyche is so remarkable, it’s as if Rituparno Ghosh has been reborn. Queen is what EnglishVinglish might have been if Sridevi’s character had discovered herself before marriage. Come to think of it, how lovely it would be to get a Queen II or an English Vinglish II in which Rani Mehra and Shashi Godbole become fast friends. That’s an aside for the future. In the here and now though, there’s Queen: a delightfully funny, sensitive, small, simple-but-not-simplistic film about coming of age past the age when most people get to do that. In a sense, it’s a sign that Bollywood too is coming of age. Queen is a royal triumph.

Rating (out of five): **** (stars out of 5)

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	151 minutes

Photographs courtesy: bollywoodtrade.com