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Journalism of Courage
Who says good girls don8217;t go places in Hindi films? They go home, they go to pray, they go to heaven. But they don8217;t go to bed with a man they8217;re not married to. That8217;s the job of bad girls like Bipasha Basu who flaunt their awesome bodies in gowns cut away at the waist.
I watched Jism last weekend and came away confused. It8217;s a slick production with excellent performances, so why did I hate it?
Because it made me angry, that8217;s why. Not just for its cliched portrayal of the sexually assertive woman as a seductress and ultimately a bitch. But because this stereotype comes from Mahesh Bhatt as scriptwriter, the same man who directed the pathbreaking Arth.
Bhatt8217;s boldness here is limited to the creation of a heroine with a sex drive. He then plays safe by making her this wicked wicked woman in sexy dresses who8217;s been using her poor innocent lover 8212; who couldn8217;t help but be attracted to her 8212; to bump off hubby.
Director Amit Saxena even draws a parallel between Basu The Bitch in Jism and Glenn Close The Bitch by lifting a scene from Fatal Attraction. That 1987 Hollywood flick had irked feminists by reducing Close to a murderous mass of hysteria while forgiving the married Michael Douglas for his weekend fling with her. After all, men do sleep with attractive strangers when their wives are away, right?
Absolution for men comes easy in popular Hindi cinema too. In last year8217;s Raaz, Dino Morea8217;s affair was conveniently glossed over by the film maker. The focus was on the obsessive girl he slept with who turned into this evil spirit. Poor boy!
The change in attitude towards women is usually superficial. In Ek Hi Bhool 1981, when Jeetendra did the deed with another woman, his wife was admonished for grudging him 8216;just one mistake ek hi bhool8217;. Twenty years later, in Haan 8230; Maine Bhi Pyaar Kiya 2002, the erring man was less brazen. Karisma Kapoor8217;s character even divorces him for his extra-marital romp. But when the couple get back together, his affair is actually turned into the subject of a joke the audience must laugh at.
But Aks 2001 raised gender prejudice to another level. This was the film in which director Rakesh Mehra cast Nandita Das as Amitabh Bachchan8217;s wife. Mehra insisted that the almost 30 year age difference between the actors was integral to the plot. It wasn8217;t.
There is a scene in Aks where Bachchan, possessed by an evil spirit, rapes his wife. I wondered then if Mehra had wanted a young actor as the wife because he felt older women don8217;t get raped. Or did he feel that for rape to happen the victim must be attractive, which an older woman can8217;t be? After nearly two years of pondering over these questions, this morning I called up Mehra. 8216;8216;Your interpretation is not entirely untrue or true,8217;8217; he replied. 8216;8216;As it is, I was making an unusual film. To show a middle-aged woman8217;s rape would have been cruel. It would have made my film too dark.8217;8217; Too dark or just not titillating enough?
