LUST STORIES 2: MORE YAWN SAMBANDH THAN ADULT FILMS

This is a longer (much much longer) version of my Sunday Mid-day column Paronormal Activity on Lust Stories 2, which you can read here.

Also, my review of Lust Stories 1 is here - Lust to Dust

In a time saturated with pornography, what can a collection of Lust Stories offer us? Perhaps a chance to experience the meanings of what sex does in our life, something that reveals an aspect of humanness beyond the functional arousals of porn. I am not sure Lust Stories S2 does this much. Like the first season, this set too features only one woman director (like, why babes? Yeh quota kisne decide kiya?). The other three films, are made by men. One film – R. Balki’s – is a #BoreMatKarYaar bhashan to shame any dadiwala. The other two are entirely fixated on the climax, and not at all on the cinematic sensuality that might build us up to it. All three are absorbed in the pleasure of their own self-congratulations. If this tells us something about how Indian men think about sex, you will agree friends, the news is not good.

 

At a larger level (yes, dear gents, you are not the larger level. Aur bhi dukh hain zamane mein), those films do reflect a growing set of sex-positive postures found in the English speaking liberal set. 

 

R Balki’s film features Neena Gupta as a ‘shocking but cool’ dadi who insists that her granddaughter and fiancée must test drive their sex life before shadi and ensure that Mount Fuji is erupting. Even the first time she says it is grating and synthetic. But by the nth utterance you start to feel you are trapped in a hell made up of sex-positive Instagram reels, perhaps as a punishment for your unsanitary tharki thoughts, outside the approved syllabus of sex-positivity: consent, safe sex, orgasms for all. Which is all the film seems to have to work with. Dadi may talk about sex not sanyas but this does not make it less of a pravachan, and preachiness helps keep people in their comfort zone while pretending to agree with new ideas. Even Neena Gupta's charm and valiant efforts cannot change this here. 

There are a couple of interesting implications in the film: the fact that Mrunal Thakur’s character while seeming cool about sex, actually fakes orgasms, for instance. I remember the first time a young colleague told me she does this, and how taken aback I was, but in the time of running Agents of Ishq I have come to understand this is very common, despite all the front of sexual liberation and feministishness that is au courant. The fact that sexuality education content online is mostly about concepts of sexuality and is full of homilies about what’s ‘normal’ rather than what actually happens within sex, especially in Indian contexts, in fact encourages this double-ness of pretending to be cool while not really being able to enjoy sex. (Read the orgasm anxiety survey we did here for more insight). 

 

The film could also have been an exploration of sex within marriage – how it sustains, what changes and doesn’t. Like much of the liberal elite the film is so convinced it is modern ki it feels embarrassingly dated. We are told Mount Fuji erupted – but it’s hearsay, we never see it. While it likes the sound of its own voice and delivers a lecture, it avoids really showing any sexualness, reflecting the squeamishness about sex that besets liberal elites.

Sujoy Ghosh’s self-congratulatory film, in which you will guess the twist in 2 minutes, avoids sex by doing a different thing. It uses a moral framework of sin and punishment to stage a kind of standard set of porno images of Tamannah Bhatia a la Savita Bhabi. Here’s a film so pleased to climax—look Ma I finished!--that it cares little about the audience’s pleasure, simply striking a series of poses of cleverness without ever really giving us a script about moral choices cleverly gamified in the afterlife. Apart from it’s The Good Place wannabeness, here is another common issue we face with many respectable gents who believe they are edgy. They hide behind painfully obvious references to pulp, instead of making their own pulp (I had a similar issue with Haseen Dilruba). I do remember the blowjob scene in Jhankar Beats, but it seems to have been a different, less self-serious time I guess. All this masking makes the film more Yawn Sambandh than Gandi Baat. And Vijay Varma as a new age Prem Chopra has begun to bore so badly that a rescue operation should be planned.

 

 Amit Surendranath Sharma’s film starring Kajol chooses to looks at how power turns lust into violence and the cycle of violence engulfs everyone in its darkness. To talk about sex as violence is a common go-to also, a way of not talking about sex often. Yet sexual violence exists daily in big and small ways – even the complete self-absorption of those who do not recognize the desires of partners is a granular violence. But the film is a bit too pleased with its willingness to go to the dark to take us there. It stumbles around in a series of awful haveli clichés of depravity, wastes the glorious Kajol and uncritically (though not intentionally I think) plays into stigmas about AIDS and sex workers.

 

 

 

Only Konkona Sen Sharma’s film (The Mirror) is grown-up enough to inhabit the world of lust. Tilottama Shome, playing a middle-aged single woman, comes home with a migraine and discovers her domestic staff, played by Amruta Subhash, having sex on her bed. She is unable to bring it up or fire her. But somehow can’t stop watching. The two become linked in a relationship of exhibitionism and voyeurism. Lust’s inexorable pull, propels transgressions of privacy and middle-class respectability. Lust is a mirror to our undomesticated inner being; carnal intimacy throbs with risk and the breathless tension of exposing our naked selves, with or without clothes. In this film, lust becomes an equalizer of sorts, even as class dynamics ebb and flow (mirroring the intimacies of domestic work itself).

 

 

 

There was a moment when I feared the film would abandon this narrative to deliver a neat gloss on class dynamics, but thankfully, the film does not use social issues as a fig leaf, as is very common in most mainstream conversations about sexuality. The fact that the quest for pleasure makes us take risks and that we judge others for having these same risky desires courses through the film, but it is not focused on delivering social commentary or treating sex as an exception or subject of referendums. It follows the journey of lust’s impacts, pausing for an unexpected romantic sex scene in the middle (featuring the wonderful Shrikant Yadav whom I first saw in Arun Fulara's tender short film Sunday), and ending with a sigh, not of resolution as much as acceptance.

 

One of its great pleasures is to watch the actors – Shome’s presence is dense and compact, like mercury, holding the character’s desires, repressions, aspirations in careful but fragile balance. The absence of sex in her life is not played for comedy as tends to happen with such characters, though it is implicit – and there are laughs in the film, which come from actual actions and ironies. Amruta Subhash is sharp and quicksilver, playing her character with crescent like slivers of personality – pragmatic, piercing, playful – emerging in scenes.

 

The film is directed with a light hand that allows us to sense meanings for the most. We are left thinking about how sex, desire and lust blur so many lines and how our desires do not remain within the actual circumference of physical sex with another but overflow into blurry erotic connections. How privacies and consensualities are often negotiated non-verbally and are also compromised in ways that cannot be encompassed by the gilb catechisms of enthusiastic consent repeated in the online world – between the Yes means Yes and No means No that find frequent, prim, bristling utterance--is a vast valley of sexual Maybes that need to be understood in far more complex ways. And more importantly understood on the terms of women and queer people, not just men - that is why we want more diversity among makers too. 

The people who have mostly been afforded complexity and the right to grey-ness have been elite men and the counter is not to flatten everything and everyone equally, but to accord complexity to all people, for complexity is what makes us human. Lust is an inclusive frame because it can travel across identities to get to the human part of us, even while it is inflected with identity. 

 

 

                                       Still from The Amorous Adventures of Megha and Shakku

                                                                 in the Valley of Consent

That engagement with relationships is really what makes a film seem adult – a great rarity on the Indian screen. So much of the stuff we watch on gender and sexuality seem to be made by sociology and women’s studies undergraduates, delivering lessons rather than exploring life and human nature.

 

My one quibble with The Mirror was with the script, which, as is increasingly common, considers cinematic events to be external incidents more than interior occurences. This approach makes the film a tad tidy, where it had the potential to take us to more tropical and humid places.Yet, what a relief to watch #GrownAss women making grown-ass work and grown ass love to watch grown up women on screen going being ludicrous, barefaced, tentative, sexual in diverse ways – as people, not symbolic characters. Sex for women in most Indian films, seems to come with consequences – Alankrita Srivastava’s oeuvre seems to consist for instance of a series of punishments rather than liberations. So it’s quite unsual to watch this non-catastrophic narrative of sex.

 

Gents, take some inspiration please.It’s free(dom).

 

When we were growing up, films which had sexual content were called Adult movies. Histories of colonialism and caste ripple around this idea. Film censorship in India was created by colonial rulers because it was felt the ‘native’ population was too childish to distinguish between screen and reality, to know right from wrong. Colonial repressions around South Asian erotic culture – outlawing tawaifs and devadasis, presenting a culture of cerebral purity as superior – meant that censoriousness and censorship have been repressed bedfellows who have shaped conversations and attitudes around sex among especially middle class elites. And this continues to inform so-called progressive discussions on sex in India which tends towards the sanitary over the life-like and messy.

There is a tendency to believe that the world of English – which A list OTTs are an extension of – has a sophisticated vocabulary of sex and by dealing with sexuality as a topic, rather than sex itself, is delivering a kind of reform. This intersects with the derision of most vernacular sexual life as vulgar or sexist. That is not to say that misogyny, sexism and violence do not exist across the board. But there is a separation of social worlds where a certain class thinks it is more sexually progressive than another.

 

 This is something I experience most clearly when journalists call me up for interviews about such questions, which assume a linear idea of progress. For instance, I may be asked how I think representation of women’s sexuality on screen has progressed. There is a tendency to believe that older Hindi films which circumvented censor laws through a number of metaphorical strategies – roses, birds, trains in tunnels, rain songs, dream sequences – were sexually backward while the fact of kisses and bonking on screen is alone enough to make something adult.

 

 But Hindi films confronted eroticism directly through the incredible repertoire of songs – there is queerness, there is cabaret, there is touch, sensuality. And there is also the emotional world of sex – longing, lust, flirtation. An erotic imagination got quite a lot of play in Hindi cinema. It’s not to say that realism cannot or does not produce a hot sexualness – but to imagine it is the superior way is quite childish. Realism is an aesthetic like any other, but it carries an idea of western privilige with it, that we would do well to query. The absence of romance and love stories in recent work is telling us something about our difficulty with engaging with this part of our humanity.

 Like children, we cling to the instructions and prescriptions of sex-positive discourses, looking at life and relationships through a legalistic lens. This is painfully, boringly clear in much of OTT content around themes of gender and sexuality, that ticking of boxes. But being adult is to be able to acknowledge greys and confront the complicatedness of life, its lack of neatness, the intersecting truths of our emotional, social and physical selves, it is to be able to go on adventures, make mistakes and learn from them, confront other people’s dislike of us, confront our own capacity for awfulness as well as beauty and poetry.

Last night I watched Tamasha Theatres' performance Be-Loved, made up of writings by queer Indians across time and space. There was so much juicy emotion, so many rich ideas and most of all so many layered accounts of lived sexualness in the play which also drew on so many different forms of popular entertainment to immerse us in a fluid world of living and loving. Agents of Ishq regularly rceceives submissions of personal stories from across backgrounds which again reveal how complex are the intimate lives of people and how much wisdom they have in understanding their own experiences. Why aren't the people who seem to make this content informing themselves about all this work in the world? Why do they think they know everything there is to know while emptying out the screen of delight and variety?

 All of this requires taking risks – as people, but also, as artists. Life and art emerge from the same tendency for expressing our selves. The boxes we like to tick in our public discussions and in our content, are also the boxes we give ourselves to exist in, with small breaths.