Julie 2 gets 'A' certificate with no cuts; distributor Pahlaj Nihalani maintains it is a 'clean' film

As the trailer of Deepak Shivdasani’s erotic thriller Julie 2 unraveled a few days ago, the viewers found it extremely difficult to get over the very first still, which read: “ Pahlaj Nihalani presents ”. Nihalani’s involvement in the film could not help but project Julie 2 as India’s first sanskari erotic thriller.

Now, Hindustan Times reports that the Central Board of Film Certificataion (CBFC), under the chairmanship of lyricist-adman Prasoon Joshi, has cleared Julie 2 with an ‘A’ certificate and no cuts, just as the film’s distributor and former CBFC chairman Nihalani predicted it would be.

The Quint quotes Nihalani as saying, “This is  just what I  had hoped for. If I was still the CBFC chairperson, I’d have  given  Julie 2 an ‘Adult’ certificate with no cuts. It is a clean ‘Adult’ film for adult members of a family. Though it’s a film on an adult subject — the exploitation of  strugglers  and newcomers in Bollywood — the film has no nudity , no skin show, no double-meaning dialogues. Like I said, it is a family film for adults and  the CBFC has done the right thing.”

While the given certification to Julie 2 is likely to be fair, Nihalani’s statement reeks of hypocrisy since he is infamous as the man who denied certification to a number of films over the past couple of years, just because those did not score high on his sanskari meter.

Julie 2 stars Raai Lakshmi, Ravi Kishan, Rati Agnihotri and Pankaj Tripathi. It is the sequel to Shivdasani’s 2004 film Julie. It is co-produced by Shivdasani and Vijay Nair’s Triumph Talkies. It is slated to release on 6 October, along with Raja Krishna Menon’s slice-of-life food film Chef and Ananth Narayan Mahadevan’s thriller Aksar 2.