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Journalism of Courage
Sex sells. Bollywood has long recognised the adage, but for decades it has cravenly gone in for the pelvic-thrust-and-heaving-bosom formula because anything more has the moral brigade up in arms.
Shashilal Nair goes several steps further in using sex straight-up in his Ek Choti Si Love Story: he fashions his heroine as an independent, urban woman who makes the first move, shoves her boyfriend on to the bed, allows his hand to caress her rump, and raises her legs as he is having her.
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But Nair draws the line here: he cuts off the viewers’ sightline at the inverted V of the bare legs, just like the 15-year-old voyeur who spies upon the heroine, all the while drowning in love with her.
The point is not that Nair has pushed the envelope as far as showing real-time sex in the movie. He has rushed in where nobody has dared to tread, in his film about a teenager obsessing about an older woman.
The point is that the four-and-a-half ‘‘sex scenes’’ which last for less than four minutes, has had leading lady Manisha Koirala so exercised that she has taken refuge with the National Commission of Women to stop the director from showing women in a negative light, and with the Mumbai High Court to stop the release of the film which portrays her in an ‘‘objectionable’’ manner.
The film was released nationwide today and according to its distributors, Shringar Films representative Utpal Acharya, it has opened to full houses everywhere. The only theatre which didn’t play the movie was New Delhi’s Golcha theatre, whose Jaipur-based owners didn’t want to run afoul of the Bombay High Court’s directive of not releasing the movie, on Koirala’s plea.
Says Acharya, ‘‘By the time the court’s order came through on Thursday evening, technically, operationally, and practically, all the prints were out of our hands. And anyway we didn’t receive anything written, so the order was open to interpretation.’’
Plus, he says, the court’s order didn’t apply to distributors and exhibitors, who are ‘‘third party’’: the two primary parties are the director and the actress.
Undaunted, Koirala today went to Bal Thackeray for redressal, and irate Shiv Sainiks stopped the film from showing in several Mumbai theatres.
Clearly, it is a classic case of a storm in a teacup.
After a viewing of the film at the Capital’s Regal theatre, you wonder what Ms Koirala is so worked up about. According to Nair, Koirala was aware exactly what her role would entail, and that, if she objected to certain scenes, a body double would be used.
Because of the controversy she stirred up, and the press springing up the double and splashing her (the double’s) identity, everyone knows that she hasn’t done those scenes.
If she knew what she was in for, where is the ‘‘breach of contract’’ that she is carrying on about?
If anything, Nair cops out in his big scene where the young protagonist is introduced to the joys of the flesh by the lady.
He lays his hands on her bare thighs (not especially bared for this sequence: she wears figure-hugging spandex uppers and lowers all through the film); his hands linger but Nair spares us our blushes and doesn’t go into any detail: the frame is filled with grainy flesh and two pairs of hands.
Within a minute, the boy finishes up, appropriately sweaty and out-of-breath. We know that it has been a definitive moment because Koirala’s character tells the boy to ‘‘go to the bathroom and clean up!’’
The point is that these scenes go with the logic of the story. Without them, the film would have no legs. There is more vulgarity in the song-and-dance sequences our movies are littered with: Koirala herself has featured in scores of such bump-and-grind numbers uncomplainingly in the past.
Hard-headed industry cynics say that Koirala has done this to garner publicity, and jump-start a flagging career-graph. Controversy, veering on the sex/vulgarity/obscenity angle, has invariably helped a film reap gains at the box-office.
The last time Regal saw such swilling crowds was when it ran Deepa Mehta’s Fire, which had the famous ‘lesbian’ scenes between Nandita Das and Shabana Azmi.
The same applied to Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen: the former, which also used a body-double for Das’s character, had flashes of bare breasts; the latter went all the way, with Seema Biswas’sPhoolan picturised in a long, harrowing mass rape, and a ‘‘full frontal’’ nude scene.
There are no full frontals in Ek Choti Si Love Story. You can clearly make out when the double is being used, because as she put it so pithily in a recent interview, ‘‘Manisha may have a better face, but I have a better body.’’
The men who were crowding the theatre, who raised a cheer everytime a ‘‘scene’’ was upon them, had great expectations, and there was muttering everytime a scene sputtered out.
The series of teaser advertisements which ran in the press a couple of months ago, showing the slopes and curves of a nude body, and a boy with a fishing pole, were much more suggestive.
