Thursday, November 10, 2011

Re-view.One

so Ra.One is a movie i like.. for reasons i'd like to believe i know... and yea, this is despite its silliness, crassness, typecasting, the neither-here-nor-there-ness of it, and the many more reasons that reviews cite explaining why its a bad film...

one of the things that has been stated unequivocally about the film is that its stereotyping of the south indian is not only over-the-top as is usually the case in bollywood films, but that its been-there-done-that...

now, to my mind, the film was only too aware of the fact that such typecasting has not only run its course, but that its come under much fire... so i'm wondering, why go ahead with it then? i mean, it certainly was not mocking the 'generations of typecasting that is the history of bollywood', as was done in movies like Om Shanti Om...

and frankly speaking, i thoroughly enjoyed the typecasting, and this was not despite knowing fully well the problematic that it poses, but because of it... the noodles and curd??? it hit so close to home, i was giggling away in my seat watching that scene... is mixing curd with everything a very tamil thing? maybe not, but for me, it so is. and, the lungi-tying scene? i thought it was ridiculously cute....

did i at all have any scruples about any of it then? i did... and this is what i'm going to try and explain to myself.. it was the entry of satish shah's character that had me squirming in my seat... till then, the typecasting had not so much to do with sexual-stereotyping as it did with other everyday-routine stuff... but enter satish shah, and the jokes became lewd, the southern-male-sexuality was all over the place with the pelvic thrusting and innuendos... and this is perhaps where i thought the film took it too far...

logically, it is the everyday-routine stereotyping that is as, if not more, dangerous in terms of its implications and after-effects... and yet, i could ignore all of that precisely because the film, it seemed to me, was speaking at a time when those routines, precisely because they are so over-done in bollywood, no longer felt insulting, but rather, just downright silly... and i laughed at the silliness of it all...

but sexuality and stereotyping is once again not new in bollywood... the virile punjabi men, or the macho jat men... or for that matter the pelvic-thrusting-south-indian-men... in fact, i'm amazed that when shahrukh khan was doing the pelvic-thrusting, i found it hilarious, but when satish shah did it, it just felt gross and wrong... so what was it about an individual doing it that made it ok, but when it came to stand for a community that didn't? did i see shahrukh khan as not actually part of that community when he was blubbering away in tamil and eating noodles and curd, or is it only when the over-statedness of the community nature of the pelvic-thrusting, literally passing from one man to another, that it irked???

i'm not stupid enough to imagine that there would be a stereotype-free film at all... but stereotyping needs to be closely shadowed by an acute sensitivity... and it is in grasping fully the sensitivity of typecasting at every given moment, that we might make inroads into humor...

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