If you give an image search of "Take One Bengali movie" on google these are the first two images that appear.
What do we see in these pictures? Blurry make out scene? So does the film "Take One" belong to the "Ragini SMS" genre? the answer is no. It has something to do with women's liberation, society's narrow perception of women's position in the society and Blah blah boo hoo...the whole works.
Do you think these images convey that message? Or they convey a completely different message, a message that went viral over the internet having versions of the title, "Swastika Mukherjee shoots nude scenes for Bengali film Take One".
The snaps and the line of promotion does plead that come to watch our film because we have your hot heroine in nude. It does not showcase the 'message' of women's liberation on the face of it.(not that I support turning a film into a message board) Does it?
Let's plead innocence of the direction. May be he did not try to spread sensation or may be he did not know what kind of vibes these shooting stills are gonna send out. That does not say much about the director's ability to understand his time but nonetheless lets just consider this.
So judging by the released shooting stills and the newly released posters, the philosophy behind the film cinema can be deduced.
Woman trounced is woman nude in ropes.
Woman liberated is woman nude and making out.
Simple enough. The key word here is nude. Women's story can not be told without stripping her.
But sadly its not the director's philosophy. He is intentionally taking this line of promotion. By exposing and objectifying woman's body (which the film blames the society of doing) director simply wants to sell his film.
This film is more dangerous because the film gives you the mask of Cinema-intellectual to hide behind while you are actually going in for just enjoying a hot makeout scene.
Sorry to say, even that would not satisfy you. Believe me when I say, there are no hot make out scene in this film 'Take one'. What you will see is a very sloppy attempt at a sexual scene which is neither sensual or erotic, not by the virtue of demystification but just simply due to bad filmmaking.
So it will again be one of those impotent attempts of incapable Mainak Bhaumik.
I think the binary of a kind of eye-brow raising middle-class who secretly watches the nude scenes and bed scenes and the new antel liberal champions of nudity and celebrators of sexuality who still like the former group watches openly or secretly nude and bed scenes for sexual titillation remains unaffected by this kind of propagandist or (as Anindyada has rightly pointed out) life-style movie. The reason is simple these movies hardly ever address the sexism that constitutes both pro-nude and anti-nude, pro-sex scene and anti-sex scene discourses. They are part of the same regime of truth that is constituted by deep seated patriarchal ideology and resultant sexism which comes as a package. Now the question is can nude scenes or sex scenes or even propaganda of nudity and sex without bounds themselves liberatory (even in a rigid conservative society). Suppose if a person simply goes and asks another person if he/she is interested to sleep or he/she out of sexual lust shows his/her private parts, shall we call that liberatory and sign of autonomy irrespective of class, gender, society, culture and other factors, supervised in each and every case by some form of patriarchy? Can sex and nudity be so innocent in a our society - in any society that is patriarchal like ours in some form or other? Are we supposed to believe that the film we are talking here takes cognizance of these critical issues? If it does will it not be a path-breaking effort for I am not aware of any such experiment yet in Indian cinema, in Bollywood or in Bangla film industry. If a girl strips naked no one can be sure if she is appropriated by patriarchy or not. Can we think of an autonomy beyond the structure? The binary of conservatives and liberals who are patriarchal and sexist alike (which includes most of us as well and we need to be excruciatingly auto-critical here) cannot be broken if we don't challenge the underlying ideology of viewing a woman as a sexual object of desire and consumption. I even don't want to enter into the question of how capitalism used this particular ideology in a specific way. I am just interested to know how in our Indian, postcolonial, liberal, so-called feminist, activist vision a nude woman or a woman getting intimate sexually is anything other than sexual and carnal - anything other than objectification and reduction of woman into a sex object?
ReplyDeleteThanks for such a well thought out comment. I am not questioning or challenging any ism. Nor am I arousing any need for a structure that will leave or break our binary understanding. I simply want to point out a discrepancy between intention and expression.
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