The Sheets Are Always White

Last October, 40 minutes into the screening of Bengali crime thril­ler Bheetu at Delhi’s Muktadhara auditorium, the secretary of the Bengali Association sprung up from his seat in a huff, stormed into the projection room and ord­ered that the screening be stopped. The Calcutta-based director, Utsav Mukherjee, says the gentleman was agg­rieved at the “explicit sexual content” of the film, saying it viola­ted what he called “the bhalo Bangla culture (good Bengali culture)”. Utsav says he “was shocked because the film had  a very successful run in Calcu­tta and the rest of Bengal and there were absolutely no complaints from the audi­e­nce. In fact, most women felt I had succeeded in bringing out the dark und­e­r­belly of repressed sexuality that exists in Bengali society,” he says. Bheetu deals with the theme of child abuse and has some scenes depicting what the director calls “perverse sexual beh­­aviour”, inclu­ding incest, stalking and rape.

Bengali films have of late been entering taboo territory, shedding what one director calls “the garb of inhibition”. Mainstream movies today do not shy away from explicit lovemaking or kissing scenes. Some might say Charulata 2011 set off the trend of “bold” films four years ago as it ventured, somewhat  aud­a­ciously, to upend the subtle sensuality of the 1964 Satyajit Ray masterpiece, Charulata. Every frame of Charulata 2011 was a ‘physical’ counter of sorts to the etherealness of the original. If the 1964 Charu (played by Madhabi Mukherjee) flitted through sighs and sil­e­nces into the poetic imagination of her husband’s younger brother and lover, the 2011 Charu, played by Rituparna Sen­g­upta, plunges right into his sinewy embrace. “The character of Charulata is complex and is about the nuances of a woman’s sexuality,” says Agnidev Chatt­erjee, who made the later Charulata. “While she is a caring wife, she is also a bored and sexually frustrated woman, whose husband has little time for her. She yearns for sex. I wanted to depict her as a real person, made of flesh and blood.” Her particular predicament, the­refore, had to be addressed with a physicality and directness. Mere dreamy glances just wouldn’t do, says the director. Of the new Charu, Rituparna Sen­gupta, told Outlook: “I as an actor always remember that it is a character that I am portraying. I can’t think, ‘I’m not going to do this and not that.’”

That said, a list of fresh Bengali rele­ases shows that filmmakers are spending an inordinate amount of time worrying over the sex theme. Take, for instance, Take One, by award-winning director Mainak Bhaumik, which delves into the life of Doel Mitra, an actress who suddenly finds herself defined not by her roles or talent but by a single ‘bold, nude scene’ in one of her films—which gets leaked on the internet.

Gaurav Pandey’s film Hanuman Dotcom is about a middle-class Bengali bhadralok getting ent­rapped in an international sex-and-crime scandal when he accidentally stumbles upon a pornsite while (of all things) learning to browse the internet. Then there is Beetnoon, jointly directed by Sudeshna Roy and Abhijit Guha, which is about the average Bengali man’s lack of privacy, his longing for “just a little time and space” with his wife. The latest in this ‘bold’ line, released this month, is Not A Dirty Film by Randeep Sarkar, and it deals with porn, promiscuity and ‘sex edu­cation’, even giving the audience a lowdown on hormones and mood swings.

Then there are the critically acclaimed, international award winners which have unfortunately not seen the screen here (with the Indian censor board possibly going apoplectic and denying a certificate) like Amitabh Chakraborty’s take on the Baul singing tradition, Cosmic Sex—which has both male and female nudity. Even the young and restless are pushing the boundaries. A recent Bengali short, The Note, by Anubhav Ghosh and a group of film school students, dealt with sexual violence and has a graphic gang-rape sequence. “Unlike in earlier times, today’s generation gets impatient with ambiguity and wants dir­ectness,” claims Onkar Mukherjee, who acted in it. Mainak, who directed Take One (which had Swastika Mukherjee, a mainstream Bengali actress, going topless for a scene), says, “If you are going to show two people making love today, you can’t have the actors wrapped in yards of cloth. It has to all  come off to make it believable....” But he hastens to add that he could “only venture into this because Swastika was so comfortable with the idea”.

Film experts attribute this new-found libertarianism to the fact that Bengal currently has a host of uninhibited actors and actresses capable of “distinguishing between reel and real”. As Mainak puts it, “Unfortunately, till now women in our country, though much more multi-faceted than the men, weren’t allowed to express themselves by what is a male- dominated society. It’s they who bear the brunt and the burden of our social stigmas. While a male actor like Emraan Hashmi can still get married after earning the tag of ‘serial kisser’, his female counterparts usually announce they will not do intimate scenes once they are married. It’s like they are unable to separate the acting bit from actually doing it.”

Meanwhile, those emboldened enough to do these “bold” scenes insist they feel they can make that difference, though only just. “That temptress was not me but my character and I am nothing like her,” says Mumtaz Sorcar, who plays the lead in Not a Dirty Film. But even she says there’s only “so far” she will go. “I have refused to take off my clothes or do kissing scenes for certain films though the  director had asked me. In fact, my motto is show physical intimacy only if really required.” (According to her, she was wearing four layers of clothing underneath the white bedsheet in the scene.)

Agnidev Chatterjee points out that it’s only because he had an actress like Ritu­parna Sengupta on board that he went ahead with Charulata 2011. “I was making a film in which the protagonist, a woman, was not squeamish about sex. I needed an actress who would be uninhibited. Other­wise, I would rather not have done it. All too often we see Indian actors and actr­esses pawing or biting each other in what is supposed to be a lovemaking scene. Far from being realistic, it becomes almost comical. But with an actress like Ritup­arna it was easy,” he says. Paoli Dam, ano­ther one of Bengal’s ‘bold brigade’—she’s even done a nude lovemaking scene in a Sri Lankan film Chatrak—says: “I am often asked, are you that comfortable with your body that you can fully shed your clothes for a part? And my response is, ‘I am actually that comfortable in my mind.’”

But is the trend more prevalent in Tollywood? Experts, including film critics and sociologists seem to think so. Cinema critic and author Shoma Chatterjee says, “If you look at some of the current Bollywood releases, you will see that they are still mostly family dramas or films with themes of national integration.” South Indian films too still prefer the ‘suggestive’ rather than ‘direct’ approach. Mai­nak Bhaumik adds some sociological per­spective to the rise of the Bengali woman: “The worship of women is inher­ent in Bengali culture. We have more female goddesses than anywhere else in India. A woman’s strength, power and independence are upheld as cultural values here.”

Some critics argue that this lies at the root of why Bengal has the most number of “bold” heroines, making it possible for films to be more explicit. Calcutta-based sociologist Bela Bhadra agrees, adding that what has been a further enabler is the fact that “technology has demystified sex...it is no longer much of a taboo”.

Interestingly, it was the Bengali Asso­ciation in Delhi that stopped the screening of Bheetu, incensed by the sexual violence depicted in it. The members arg­ued that the film did not represent Bengali culture but was a distorted version of it. A veteran actor who has worked with Ray tells Outlook (on condition of anonymity) that he’s none too impressed with these new-age films. “The kind of films churned out in the name of cinema in Bengal today was unthinkable in our time. Cinema was ‘art’ then, not this ‘mass entertainment’ or ‘pornography’. I am particularly disturbed by comparisons of some of these films to Ray’s masterpieces,” he says. Notwithstanding the debate, though, the Bengali ‘bold’ brigade marches forward. Their claim, and there is some merit to it, is that theirs is Not A Dirty Picture.

By Dola Mitra in Calcutta