Bollywood has been releasing a lot of films lately that primarily focus on major social issues that are currently faced by a lot of minorities within the country. Topics such as homosexuality, transphobia, inter-caste marriage, sexual discrimination, religious discrimination, casteism, violence against women, religious restrictions, even taboo on talking about sex, all have films released by Bollywood – with varying degrees of success. While some films have done much better than others (in the box office or among critics), one fact still remains – these films lack finesse and a lot of the time, sensitivity.
Take the upcoming Bollywood film, ‘Badhaai Do‘, for example. The trailer for this Rajkummar Rao–Bhumi Pednekar starrer dropped online a couple of days ago and it has already raised a few issues with the LGBTQIA+ community within the country, for the comedic premise of a lavender couple. There are many closeted men, women and people of other sexualities stuck in loveless marriages in India – most of whom were forced into marriage by their families. While we understand that this film was supposed to be a feature about the suffering of members from the LGBT community – a semi-funny rendition of probably some of the worst nightmarish scenarios about a minority community isn’t the way to go about it.
And this is not the only issue seen in these Bollywood features. Even in decent-to-good films like ‘Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui‘, ‘Pink’, ‘Padman’, etc. – a lot of the time, a major character (usually the protagonist) stands out and is shown to be preaching morals values at a crowd – who are supposed to symbolise the audience members in most of these films. While blatant moral preaching has worked with films in the past, without some realism or story-based reasoning for a speech – these moral outbursts can be very off-putting.
Still, it is a good thing that Bollywood is talking about these important issues at all – since most of these issues are still taboo all over the country. Now, they need to back it up with more realistic stories and appropriate messages. Hopefully, we will get to see this sooner rather than later.
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