My Mirror column:
For the women in Lipstick Under My Burkha, words are a necessary weapon on the quest for desire – but they can also wound.
Sometimes a film can start a conversation. Lipstick Under My Burkha, about which I wrote in these pages last week, definitely has. I suggested in the previous column that what makes Lipstick stand out in the long history of Hindi cinema is that it allows us to see women as erotic beings, with their eroticism shorn of the necessary veneer of long-term romantic love. Certainly writer-director Alankrita Shrivastava and her co-writers Gazal Dhaliwal and Suhani Kanwar have crafted a film in which women have more of a relationship with sex than our female characters have ever been allowed to.
But thankfully, unlike a particular sort of feminist girl-gang movie recently emerging from India with English titles – think of Pan Nalin’s infuriatingly flimsy Angry Indian Goddesses (2015), or Leena Yadav’s overly-choreographed rural drama Parched (2016) – the women in Lipstick experience sex in a variety of registers. Repression and bawdiness, set up as polar opposites, are not the only modes of being sexual.
Yes, the film uses the unabashed excesses of Hindi erotica to unbutton our tightly-laced selves, as well as casually dropping references to husbands getting excited by a ‘Brazilian’. But there is a tendency to imagine that women who speak freely – of sex, or anything else – are necessarily empowered. Lipstick, I was overjoyed to find, recognizes the range of possibilities that exist in the gulf between silence and staging.
The woman whom we see suffering through the worst sort of sex with her husband, Konkona Sensharma’s Shirin, is also the one who most needs to produce the pretense that all is well. The brave front she puts up is a recurring theme in the film. Early on, a woman to whom Shirin is selling a pest-control gun turns it towards her husband’s portrait, asking if it will work on this sort of pest. Shirin smiles a secret smile and says her ‘pest’ stays in control – even without a gun. We have not yet met her husband, so we – like the customer – are taken in.
Later, after the film has let us view the humiliations of her marital bed, we hear her produce another bit of light-hearted repartee, this time to explain to her gynaecologist why she keeps getting pregnant. “We get so caught up in the moment that it’s hard to stop and make him wear a condom...,” she says, looking at us rather than the doctor. This time, neither the doctor nor we are fooled.
That depiction of her husband as being swayed by desire offers, in fact, a sinister contrast to the brutally mechanical way in which we see him use her body. It is cold comfort that Shirin is also the only character who speaks – if only once, and fearfully – of sex as pain. “Jalan ho rahi hai,” she says as her husband enters her without the slightest kiss or caress, or even an affectionate word. And yet to hear her say those words is shocking, because it brings into a Hindi film soundscape a female body’s response to forced sex – not couched in the dramatically over-determined register of rape, violation, or even fear, but as physical pain made ordinary.
The emotional impact of that recurring physical hurt, on the other hand, is not something even Shirin can summon up words for. We see her, in the aftermath of the worst such scene, stuffing her mouth in silent anger – a cake she baked hoping to sweet-talk her husband into giving her ‘permission’ to work is now merely something to help her swallow her own tears.
The film’s feistiest character, Leela, is someone to whom words come easily, whether it is in wooing potential clients for a new business idea, or seducing her photographer lover. She is the opposite of years of Hindi-movie coyness when she appears in her lover’s room and says with beguiling candour: “Sex toh kar le.” And yet all the power of that openness is easily turned against her, as soon as the man decides to demean the woman’s desire by calling it ‘merely’ physical.
The Rehana segment, otherwise weakened by its excessive cool-girl stereotypes and its overly obvious dialoguebaazi (“jeans ka haq, jeene ka haq”), has one wonderful scene in which sexual tension is created with words. She is drinking with a flirtatious senior (Shashank Tiwari) when he gestures casually in her direction and asks, “Virgin?” Rehana freezes – and only relaxes when he indicates it is only her alcoholic virginity he was inquiring about.
Perhaps the film’s most challenging narrative is that of Usha, who uses two kinds of verbal covers – the words of a fictional character called Rosie, and the anonymity provided by the telephone – to carry on an increasingly torrid affair with a younger man. Words are what enable the 55-year-old widow to articulate a long-dormant, long-frustrated erotic self – but the man seduced by her “sexnuma awaaz” is quick to turn against her when he realizes who she ‘really’ is.
But all this talk of the body is a way of exposing the innermost corners of our minds – and that can make us incredibly vulnerable.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30 July 2017.
For the women in Lipstick Under My Burkha, words are a necessary weapon on the quest for desire – but they can also wound.
Sometimes a film can start a conversation. Lipstick Under My Burkha, about which I wrote in these pages last week, definitely has. I suggested in the previous column that what makes Lipstick stand out in the long history of Hindi cinema is that it allows us to see women as erotic beings, with their eroticism shorn of the necessary veneer of long-term romantic love. Certainly writer-director Alankrita Shrivastava and her co-writers Gazal Dhaliwal and Suhani Kanwar have crafted a film in which women have more of a relationship with sex than our female characters have ever been allowed to.
But thankfully, unlike a particular sort of feminist girl-gang movie recently emerging from India with English titles – think of Pan Nalin’s infuriatingly flimsy Angry Indian Goddesses (2015), or Leena Yadav’s overly-choreographed rural drama Parched (2016) – the women in Lipstick experience sex in a variety of registers. Repression and bawdiness, set up as polar opposites, are not the only modes of being sexual.
Yes, the film uses the unabashed excesses of Hindi erotica to unbutton our tightly-laced selves, as well as casually dropping references to husbands getting excited by a ‘Brazilian’. But there is a tendency to imagine that women who speak freely – of sex, or anything else – are necessarily empowered. Lipstick, I was overjoyed to find, recognizes the range of possibilities that exist in the gulf between silence and staging.
The woman whom we see suffering through the worst sort of sex with her husband, Konkona Sensharma’s Shirin, is also the one who most needs to produce the pretense that all is well. The brave front she puts up is a recurring theme in the film. Early on, a woman to whom Shirin is selling a pest-control gun turns it towards her husband’s portrait, asking if it will work on this sort of pest. Shirin smiles a secret smile and says her ‘pest’ stays in control – even without a gun. We have not yet met her husband, so we – like the customer – are taken in.
Later, after the film has let us view the humiliations of her marital bed, we hear her produce another bit of light-hearted repartee, this time to explain to her gynaecologist why she keeps getting pregnant. “We get so caught up in the moment that it’s hard to stop and make him wear a condom...,” she says, looking at us rather than the doctor. This time, neither the doctor nor we are fooled.
That depiction of her husband as being swayed by desire offers, in fact, a sinister contrast to the brutally mechanical way in which we see him use her body. It is cold comfort that Shirin is also the only character who speaks – if only once, and fearfully – of sex as pain. “Jalan ho rahi hai,” she says as her husband enters her without the slightest kiss or caress, or even an affectionate word. And yet to hear her say those words is shocking, because it brings into a Hindi film soundscape a female body’s response to forced sex – not couched in the dramatically over-determined register of rape, violation, or even fear, but as physical pain made ordinary.
The emotional impact of that recurring physical hurt, on the other hand, is not something even Shirin can summon up words for. We see her, in the aftermath of the worst such scene, stuffing her mouth in silent anger – a cake she baked hoping to sweet-talk her husband into giving her ‘permission’ to work is now merely something to help her swallow her own tears.
The film’s feistiest character, Leela, is someone to whom words come easily, whether it is in wooing potential clients for a new business idea, or seducing her photographer lover. She is the opposite of years of Hindi-movie coyness when she appears in her lover’s room and says with beguiling candour: “Sex toh kar le.” And yet all the power of that openness is easily turned against her, as soon as the man decides to demean the woman’s desire by calling it ‘merely’ physical.
The Rehana segment, otherwise weakened by its excessive cool-girl stereotypes and its overly obvious dialoguebaazi (“jeans ka haq, jeene ka haq”), has one wonderful scene in which sexual tension is created with words. She is drinking with a flirtatious senior (Shashank Tiwari) when he gestures casually in her direction and asks, “Virgin?” Rehana freezes – and only relaxes when he indicates it is only her alcoholic virginity he was inquiring about.
Perhaps the film’s most challenging narrative is that of Usha, who uses two kinds of verbal covers – the words of a fictional character called Rosie, and the anonymity provided by the telephone – to carry on an increasingly torrid affair with a younger man. Words are what enable the 55-year-old widow to articulate a long-dormant, long-frustrated erotic self – but the man seduced by her “sexnuma awaaz” is quick to turn against her when he realizes who she ‘really’ is.
But all this talk of the body is a way of exposing the innermost corners of our minds – and that can make us incredibly vulnerable.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30 July 2017.
