At last, a mainstream Hindi commercial film that neither mocks nor patronizes the LGBTQ community. These were my thoughts after seeing Harshvardhan Kulkarni’s Badhaai Do.
Badhaai Do, indeed. This calls for congratulations. After what they did to the community in Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan ….This remarkably lighthearted film on a very sad lavender marriage couldn’t have been easy to make. There is so much to be said about the tragic misrepresentation and gross neglect of the gay community. And really, the audience is not in the mood to be tutored about how the gay/LGBTQ community deserves to be treated.
So here’s what director Harshvardhan Kulkarni and his talented writers Suman Adikary and Akshat Ghildial have done: they have brought in an army of prejudiced opinions into play and then put them in a non-preachy engaging agreeable charming perspective without getting over-cute.
A tall order. But Kulkarni has pulled it off with panache and assurance. And though the film could have been better edited—the segment where Rajkummar Rao’s mom, played as a scatterbrained spaced out non-interfering matriarch played by the seasoned Sheeba Chadha in a family of bullies and busybodies, goes on and on losing its sheen with every passing shot—Badhaai Do succeeds in doing what no other mainstream Hindi film has done: it confers dignity and credibility to the LGBTQ community without getting hysterical or self-righteous.
The tone remains stubbornly ebullient, though not at the cost of blow-drying the complex emotions for easy consumption. The vast cast is fully clued in to the tricks of the trek. The 180-minute journey is not without its hiccups. But the principal actors, the very exceptional Rajkummar Rao and Bhumi Pednekar, not to mention a supporting cast of immensely intuitive skilled players imbue the main conflict with a bedroom of conviction.
One of the film’s many charms is the supporting cast of partially unexposed faces standing in as the intrusive family: why isn’t Shardul (Rao) getting married, when he does get married, why isn’t Sumi (Pednekar) getting pregnant, and who is that North-Eastern girl living with Shardul and Sumi? Chum Darang as Jhilmil, Sumi’s girlfriend is one of those many fresh faces that lend vitality and vivacity to this mellow drama of a marriage of tragic compromise.
While some of the intended highpoints, like Rao’s drunken confessions to his newly married bride Sumi during the honeymoon, fall flat, other moments of dramatic conflicts, such as Sumi’s father (Nitesh Pandey)’s breakdown after she comes out in front of her family, are tremendously effective.
Rajkummar Rao’s coming-out sequence will be recalled for years as a turning point in Bollywood’s uneasy relationship with the gay community. Yes, Hindi cinema on sexual themes finally seems to be attaining puberty.
Badhaai Do reminded me of three other films from three parts of the world that give dignity to the gay community without patting themselves on their backs.
Heidi Ewing’s I Carry You With Me in Spanish is a hugely lauded Mexican film about two men who hide their mutual love for decades. It is an epic love story. Ewing comes brings her docu-sensibilities into a story that needed a David Lean’s vision. Instead, it gets a director who turns a panoramic romance sweeping into several decades and two countries, into a lean lithe exasperatingly confusing story of sexual identity.
Like all great and cheesy same-sex love stories, I Carry You With Me has one partner out of the closet and the other in it. Ivan (Armando Espitia) is the one hiding in the closet because he has plenty to lose: mainly the right to meet his son and of course societal approbation, a big thing during the times when the film begins (not sure when, because the director chooses uncertainty in every factor related to the epic romance).
Two sequences stood out for me. The first is when Juan’s wife shows up with their son at his doorstep in the pouring rain when he is with Gerardo. The other memorable sequence is that where Juan tries to sneak into America from Mexico with an out-of-shape cousin posing as his wife. The crossover is of course metaphoric. Sometimes borders can be killers. While the film negotiates its protagonist geographically and sexually, it fails to take the audience along.
Geetu Mohandas’s Mothoon in Malayalam is a far better look at repressed same-sex love. In her sophomore film, director Geetu Mohandas (whose debut film Liars Dice is an undiscovered gem) has actually yoked two films together into a work of stunning impact. On the surface, Moothon is a travel tale of a 15-year-old child’s search for his missing elder brother. Amir has gone missing in the bustle of Mumbai. The male child, played by a female actor Sanjana Dipu, travels to Mumbai alone and gets sucked into the city’s brutal underbelly with barely space for anyone to breathe.
With her husband cinematographer Rajeev Ravi to capture every heartbeat of her creative outpouring, Geetu Mohandas breathes resplendent life into every frame. Her Mumbai is a breathless morass of self-destruction. And Nivin Pauly is the emperor of Mohandas’s simmering inferno.
Let me say this right here. Nivin Pauly is a revelation. With this one performance—actually, it’s two performances so seamlessly fused together that they become completely unified—Pauly joins the elitist circle of the most accomplished actors of our country.
His Akbar is a force of Nature. Thundering against the humanity that he has buried under the rubble of roughness, his performance epitomizes that musk of machismo that men are supposed to flaunt to be considered “man enough”.
Miraculously, and with a fascinating fluency, Geetu Mohandas flips the coin, and takes us into a ravishing romance captured by the splashing sea waves of Lakshadweep in a flashback between Akbar and his mute soul-mate Amir (Roshan Matthew). This is a love story so freed of gender restrictions that I wanted to stand up and applaud not just the supreme sensitivity of the director but also the indomitable bravery of the two actors. In scenes that are reminiscent of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, the two actors portray love with spellbinding immersive intensity. When Nivin Paul and Roshan Matthew look at each other they see neither man nor woman. They see only love.
Paul and Matthew don’t “play” lovers. They embody love at its sublimest. With shattering abruptness the romance ends suddenly. The plot somersaults into the sordid violence it had left behind and lands on its feet. The violent life that Akbar has chosen for himself is challenged by the presence of a child who needs to be protected from sexual aggression.
I felt this part of an otherwise flawless film to be over-burdened with the task of coping with LGBTQ issues. There is also a transgender character (played with cogent urgency by Sujith Shankar) who doesn’t quite fit into this epic jigsaw that tackles the age-old question of sexual identity without getting sweaty under the collar.
This a remarkably restrained and ruminative treatise on love, intimacy, longing and grieving. It is one of the decade’s bravest most accomplished Indian films with heartbreaking moments of meditative melancholy. In one sequence the mute Amir tries to enunciate Akbar’s name in his ear. Yup, Call Me By Your Name, indeed.
And finally, a frothy film on homosexuality where it is not a problem for anyone.
Michael Mayer’s Single All The Way is a blink into pink. Normally, in a film about gay couples, the problem is that one of the two persons in the relationship doesn’t want to come out, or one of the two persons sharing a gay relationship takes his partner to meet his family without telling them about the true nature of their relationship.
Last year in the dreadfully dehydrated Last Season the smashing Kristen Stewart (out in real life) accompanied her partner home for Christmas without telling the partner’s family that when they sleep together they don’t get much sleep. The problem in the delightful Single All The Way is that there is no problem. Peter (Michael Urie) is about to go home for Christmas with his lover when Peter’s house-mate Nick (Philemon Chambers) discovers that Peter’s lover is married and happy (and only pretending to be unmarried and gay). In a fit of desperation, Peter asks Nick to accompany him to his home pretending to be his gay partner.
This is where this fey festy feelgood film departs from all the lightweight or heavy LGBTQ films. Everybody knows. There is no pretence, no subterfuge no artifice involved in the main protagonist’s sexual preference. His family knows Peter is gay. Their worry is not about his sexuality but about his inability to find a partner. Happily, Peter’s entire family is on it, doing their utmost to foist the affable Nick on Peter. His two nieces even pretend to sleep in Peter’s bed, so he would have to share Nick’s bed.
The blissed-out scenario is borderline burlesque but beautifully self-deprecatory, drawing attention to the Nick-Peter companionship’s compatibility quotient without letting gender be an issue. It’s a tricky situation and one that could have been an elephant-in-the-room kind of problem.
Single All The Way charms us into looking at the protagonists as gender-free pair. We talk about cinema being rooted to humaneness that liberates relationships of their gender and sexual biases. Hardly film achieves this state of freedom. Single All The Way does it, and that too within the gauzy romcom space.
To be able to bring a gay couple to a state of complete social acceptance is no small achievement for a feel-good film. Single All The Way is smart, smooth and sexy. The performances are not constructed to win Oscars. But the actors love their characters. And Jennifer Coolidge as a busty raunchy spaced-out aunt is a hoot.
Single All The Way breaks a ceiling or two while doing its own variation on the thorny issue of gay relationships and their acceptance within the family fold. To cite an example, the guy whom Nick is persuaded to date by his family is not your stereotypical vain jerk but a genial regular guy. And you would expect Peter’s parents (the wonderful Cathy Najimy and Barry Botswick) to be in denial about their son’s sexual orientation. This is not a film that encourages prejudice. It embraces the idea of a world where it won’t matter anymore who is black or white(for the record, Nick is Black and Peter is White) and who is gay or straight.
Hopefully, we will see more films soon which normalize rather than trivialize or worse, patronize gay relationships.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He's been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.
source https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/first-take-badhaai-do-moothon-single-all-the-way-i-carry-you-with-me-a-latest-quartet-of-commendable-lgbtq-films-10369451.html
