Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Laila in Heropanti 2 insults the LGBTQ Community

For all its swaggering bravado post the scrapping of the draconian Section 377, Indian cinema remains numbingly namby-pamby on the portrayal of the homosexual community. Ayushmann Khurrana may think he did the gay community a great service by –gasp!—playing a gay man in Shubh Mangal Zyada Zyada Saavdhan.

But isn’t it time Bollywood stopped feeling good about itself for giving the marginalized communities a voice? Do we hear Kate Winslet thumping her back for playing a lesbian in _Ammonite_?

Even by Bollywood’s shamelessly self-congratulatory attitude to the projection of alternate sexuality, Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Laila in Ahmed Khan’s horrendous _Heropanti 2_ is in shockingly bad taste. And it surprises me that an actor of Nawaz’s calibre and conscience agreed to play this hideously inappropriate character.

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Was it the zeroes on the cheque? But Nawaz himself has told me repeatedly that he would never do a role for money, and especially not one that insults any community or individual. And yet, here he is in a frightfully offensive grotesque role that no self-respecting actor would touch with a bargepole.

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Nawazuddin’s Laila is hard to define. Laila is a vicious sadistic venomous creature of the night, all dressed up in sequins and sparkling garish jackets, with tons of makeup on his face. Laila is clearly into crossdressing, and best of luck to him with that. He is the Joker in makeup. No, actually the Joker wore makeup too. So what is Laila??!!!

The brains(?) behind this brain-dead concoction want to make Laila much more interesting than he actually is. It’s all about ‘de-masculinizing’(to coin a term) the villain and yet making him a bloodthirsty mean vicious sociopath.

I can just imagine the storytellers at producer Sajid Nadiadwala’s office, adding layer after layer of makeup to Laila’s character until all their homophobic fantasies are manifested on screen in the crudest and most blatant display of machismo since Sadashiv Amrapurkar’s Maharani in Mahesh Bhatt’s Sadak.

Nawazuddin’s Laila in Heropanti 2 is the worst nightmare of the gay community come true. Nawaz plays Laila as what was dero-gay-torily known in the era before sexual freedom (illusory as it is) as a pansy. He walks with an exaggerated swing and does the soft-wrist act with a flourish of a circus performer doing some risky acrobatics for laughs.

Laila is written to amuse and tickle homophobic sections of the audience. Sadly, Nawaz gets into the swing of it, literally, with no sense of purpose or conviction. The queer character is just a garish makeup freak with a penchant for flamboyant makeup and a cackling laughter that is supposed to scare the hell out of his adversaries. We heard Nawaz let out the same cackle in Nadiadwala’s Kick.

Laila is neither amusing nor scary. He is just an unfinished hazy puzzle. Is he gay or just an effeminate (“pansy”) made-up crossdresser? There are hints that he is attracted to the hero Babloo ( Tiger Shroff) who is dating Laila’s sister.

In Heropanti 2, Nawazuddin Siddiqui has arguably given his career’s worst performance. The character lacks depth, dignity and context. It also lacks a basic constructional decency.

It is an inherently duplicitous character. While Nawazuddin Siddiqui was shooting for Heropanti 2 in London he couldn’t stop talking about how he has paid a tribute to the great Vinod Khanna through his villainous character.

“I have always been a huge fan of Vinod Khanna. What grace and swag he had!. I’ve tried to copy Vinod Khana’s walk and swag in Heropanti 2,” Nawaz had said to me.

I searched really hard for Vinod Khanna in Nawazuddin’s effeminate gay character in Heropanti 2.

Errrr, have we missed something here?

Incidentally, Nawaz was reportedly paid Rs 20 crores, the highest fee he has received so far, for his lewd Laila act in Heropanti 2. Whenever Nawaz has attempted to crack the Hindi commercial cinema he has drawn a blank. Moral of the story: don’t even go there.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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