RIFLE RANGE BOY

Close (Flemish, 2022) Director:  Lukas Dhont Gone are the times when people used to be safe amongst their own kind. Girls were comfortable mingling with girls, and boys can act normal amongst their guy friends. In fact, boys and girls, after a certain age, will feel curious about the opposite sex but at the time feel uncomfortable breaking the ice.  If growing up is not difficult enough, maturing from a teenager to morph into a young adult and pave a future for himself, now he has to deal with his sexuality. He is now cornered to be assigned a gender at increasingly diabolical ages. Children used to have a sweet phase of their life called childhood where they could play, be carefree and explore things as and when they find fit. Things happened naturally. Now, there is a rush to compartmentalise. In certain localities, part of the educators' scope of duties includes identifying students trapped in a wrongly assigned gendered body. Psychological assessments would legitimatise...

Christiane Amanpour: Sex and Love Around the World (Netflix Documentary, Season 1; 2018) This provocative six-episodes presentation discusses matter considered taboo in many of the towns the episodes were centred - Tokyo, Delhi, Beirut, Berlin, Accra and Shanghai. If one were to look at olden civilisations, it seems evident that our ancestors used to quite accepting of sexual practices and its deviations. The Japanese, during the Edo period, boasts of Shunga erotic art. They were a liberal and stable society. All that came to zilch when Commodore Perry landed in Edo Bay and Emperor Meiji banned their erotic drawings.  The Indians had Kamasutra long before the Western world learned to count, but in the New World, it was viewed as yellow literature. The Victorian mindset even deemed donning of saree was obscene. In the 19th century and before, the blouse was not part of the female attire. The saree was used to drape the chest and bosom as well. Legends say that the Tagore la...

That is what the world has come to. There is sadly no 'one-answer-fit-all' response. The people who argue against the grain are smart people with intelligence quotients higher than the general public.  Everyone is concerned only of his own self. There is an inner desire to live life to the fullest; enough of living under the pretence that something sacrosanct needed to be protected. If all this while they had cowed to societal pressures and suppressed their inner needs, it was the time that they let their hair down. They do as they please. Over generations, through trials and error, regulations have been put in the system. Each sex had their gender roles. Each gender had their duties and expectations. It was not a perfect arrangement, but there was a semblance of order. The general public accepted it as necessary to continue our existence.  Nothing does not offend anyone any more. This signage in  an Italian B and B with an 'alien' in a coquettish p...

Nymphomaniac Vol 1 and 2 (2013) Director, Screenplay: Lars Von Tier Humans demand that it is their birthright to demand their pleasures. It is one's fundamental necessity to live a fulfilled life where it is filled with various pleasures. After all, they say, you only live once. You are only given the opportunity to live once. You are supposed to live to the fullest. You should go the whole 9 yards to make it a reality. And you blame all your future failures and underachievement to these unfulfillments. Somehow, it seems legitimate to holds others responsible for your existence accountable to your follies. The fault is anybody's except yours. On the other end, another group would argue that life on earth is torture. Our time here is an opportunity to serve and gain merit points for an eternal afterlife. They live by preset rules, suppressing their innate desires that they perceive every temptation as a test of virtue from the dark side to commit sin . This 5-hour presen...

There he is. At one look at the smile and the curling of the right lip, I knew it is him. Phew, it has been 20 years. That is how long I have not seen him. Gosh! Has it been that long? That droopy eyes are still there. The worry lines had increased. Boy, he sure looks tired. Tired perhaps of putting all of the world’s worries on his shoulders. We are meeting after all these years at a Christmas party of a mutual friend. We both have been embroiled in own commitments that old friends took a back seat and new ones stay distant, in distance and geniality. As before, many years ago in our young adulthood, oblivious to the general public who were wishing each others wishes of the occasion and engaged in meaningless cursory banters, we found ourselves a cosy, quiet corner to continue what we used to enjoy all the time, a serious discourse on the purpose and meaning of life. My friend’s childhood is a tale of survival and fighting against all odds to stay afloat in life. For him, phrases...

Un-freedom (2015) Probably the ban on this film skyrocketed its popularity. An indie film made by a debutante filmmaker director using relatively unknown actors (minus Victor Banerjee), using unconventional cinematography technique and storytelling suddenly stirred everybody's fancy. The censors probably thought that there were too many scenes with the unnecessary meaningless show of flesh and gory violence was too much for the general public to stomach. Two unrelated stories are told in parallel in two different corners of the world, in Delhi and New York. The shots are abrupt and tend to move at a fast pace intertwining scene to scene. Halfway through the movie, you are still wondering where the film is heading, and both events are related. Anyway, they are not, but the symbolism is there, much about it later. In Delhi, a bride runs away from her wedding to be her lesbian lover, a Caucasian free-spirited hippie painter who is a promoter of the LGBT movement. The trouble ...

Ram-Leela  a.k.a.  Goliyon Ki Raasleela  (Play of Bullets, Hindi; 2013) In my book of review and Rotten Tomatoes, this film would fall somewhere between decaying fly-infested flavanoids lost tomato and a maggot-infested putrefying one. A century ago, when the sub-continent was experimenting with the silver screen, it chose 'Raja Harishchandra' from its vast reservoir of traditional folklore. In time, the story of love took many turns and U-turns to depict love in innumerable possibilities. Occasionally, new formulas would produce many copy cat follow-ups with the same storyline but different settings. Mostly, the films would end depicting poetic justice, satisfying society's beliefs, traditions, and fragile society structures. Maybe I am a sucker for a good storyline and unexpected twists. Hence, when the credits rolled in to announce that the story was based on 'Romeo and Juliet', I was tad disappointed. In a flash, the whole story flashed in front of me. ...

When you give a child a certain instruction to do or not to do something, you will see them try their luck to beyond what they are supposed to or not supposed to do. If a barricade is erected to limit their space, they would stand touching the barricade. If the barricade is a rope, they would stretch their luck as far the rope would stretch. If the barricade is solid, they would stand on the boundary and see whether if their action is remanded. If it is all quiet on the top brass, they may stretch their reach by stepping a foot out to test the waters. This type of treading dangerous waters can also be seen in Hollywood and amongst teenage girls who are slowly getting comfortable with their body image and sexuality. In the 1940s, actresses were required to cover up till their necks without revealing the silhouette of their contours. Later, by pushing for changes, the filmmakers managed to get the censors to allow a little bit of cleavage. With creative thinking, they manage to b...