Dear Adoor Gopalakrishnan: We are all horny movie-goers; which of us will you ban?

Dear Adoor Gopalakrishnan I understand where you are coming from. I really do. I remember well the cheap “ceetee” rows in a cinema where rowdy men (and only men) wolf-whistled at every glimpse of skin that got past a censor’s scissors. I remember slash-and-flesh Jaws ripoff films like Tintorera coming to theaters in India because there was an audience for women in bikinis being attacked by sharks while doughty Oscar winners never showed up here. I remember the underground rumour mill that classified films at International film festivals by skin content, no mean feat of dogged research in the days before the Internet. But I also remember as hormonal teenagers going to watch the Richard Gere starrer An Officer and a Gentleman a second time because some mischievous classmate had spread the completely false rumour that the noon show sneaked in some uncensored bits. To our chagrin not only was the film the same, there were no “uncensored bits” in the first place. Blue Lagoon was a rite of passage for an entire generation and they were not interested in it as a piece of fine filmmaking. [caption id=“attachment_1803049” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Poster of Satyam Shivam Sundaram.[/caption] My point is let those without “sin” cast the first stone if you can even call something as basic as sex, or a desire for it, a sin. It is indeed a problem that hordes of sex-starved filmgoers occupy seats all day at an international film festival while delegates from abroad cannot get in. But honestly, that seems to be more an issue of crowd management. Does that warrant a kind of intellectual gate-keeping - quizzing delegates about their education, their festival attendance history, their favourite director and films before they can even enter the auditorium? The problem is not that film festivals come with the “expectations of hot scenes” as much as the fact there’s so little else out there to meet those same needs. We don’t even really have our equivalent of a Blue Lagoon and no, the tepid desi remake Teri Baahon Mein with Mohnish Behl and Ayesha Dutt does not count. Neither do those cheap titillation films that come from your own state and once screened in morning shows in theaters around the country with names like Lonely Nights and Playgirls 2. We remain, despite the internet and the occasional mobile phone sex video that goes viral, a deeply repressed society. Until recently the easiest way to show sex on our screens was through rape as long as the rapist received suitably gruesome punishment for his crimes eventually. Now we hear stories of real rapists who rev themselves up with porn but that does not mean that millions who are not rapists don’t do the same. In The Telegraph article where you say this is a “manufactured controversy” there’s a telling anecdote from the Facebook update of Arindam Sil, a key figure behind the Kolkata International Film Festival.

Overheard at Film Festival one cine goer to other. ‘Whose film are we going to watch? Other One — SunnyLeone. He meant Tsai Ming Liang (a celebrated director of Taiwanese films).

At one level we could roll our eyes and laugh at the plight horny cineaste who confuses Tsai Ming Liang with Sunny Leone. He could end up walking into the work of a filmmaker who has shown what the New York Times called the point of no return of “Asian miserablism” - “an 11-minute scene of a homeless man smothering and devouring a cabbage with a face painted on it.” On the other hand, film communes with audiences in mysterious ways. Perhaps thanks to his confusion he will discover one of the celebrated directors of Taiwanese cinema today. That’s the wonder, and the risk, of walking into the dark of a theatre. Wasn’t it Raj Kapoor who said unabashedly after Satyam Shivam Sundaram that people would come to see Zeenat Aman’s breasts and go out remembering the film? Decades later there are thousands who will walk into Rang Rasiya for similar reasons but hopefully will get more out of that film than that much-discussed flash of nudity.There’s exposure and there’s exposure and sometimes the twain do meet. The point of bringing an international film festival to a city is to expose its citizens, and that includes novices and the horny thrill-seeker (and by the way those are NOT mutually exclusive categories) to all kinds of new films that would never reach their theatres otherwise. The point of a film festival is not to have the cognoscenti nod wisely with other cognoscenti about what they all already cognizant about. At a time when filmmakers, especially independent filmmakers, struggle to bring audiences into theatres the last thing one should do is make it harder for anyone to attend any film festival. Anyway in this day and age of the internet, hardcore cheap thrills are just a click away as any visit to an internet parlour will show. Pornography is easily available and downloads of XXX-action are filling computers around the country with viruses. The allure of a few minutes of a nudity as payoff for sitting through two hours of subtitles is not as powerful as it was thirty years ago. Perhaps the audience that still comes with the “expectations of hot scenes” are also expecting to get something from the rest of the film as well, hoping that there is a Dirty Picture beyond the dirty pictures. Please do everything you can to expose audiences to world cinema outside film festivals. Please do everything possible to invigorate film clubs, to create audiences for films that push boundaries, and not just sexual ones. But please don’t give the impression that some kind of film watchers are more deserving than others. Let’s be discriminating about the films we bring to the festivals but not about the audiences that watch them.