Sex and Intimacy in Cinema

For the longest time, my exposure to Hollywood movies was limited to Jurassic Park or Anaconda or Bats, or Godzilla. Not because I liked watching monsters on screen. But because movies like Titanic would have been far too vulgar for me. Even though Indian television censored all sex scenes in Hollywood movies, my parents were convinced Hollywood (and people in the West) are all about graphic descriptions of sex! I still haven’t watched Titanic uncensored. 

If there’s anything that put Lust Stories 2 on the Most Watched list this month, it was the Konkona Sen Sharma directorial The Mirror. Exploring the importance of a space of one’s own in sex and the apparent loneliness of an elite woman, the short film portrayed sex and sensuality in a way that was hardly seen on Indian screens. 

Limited to voyeurism and violence, sex has hardly been more than ‘cheap entertainment’ in Indian movies. It’s either layered under heavy classical music or romantic songs or just stirs up the screen, enticing the audience. 

Sex and Space

The characters in The Mirror are real and raw. There’s no tantalizing sex or an attempt to keep viewers hooked to the screen via female nudity. It’s just sex between a man and wife in another person’s apartment. The couple comes from an economically-disadvantaged background and cannot afford to have a space. But they do need to keep the spark in their relationship alive. Sex does play a role in strengthening their relationship, and it is essential to them. That’s something the owner of the spacious apartment does not have in her life. 

Tilottama Shome brings out the essence of a single, successful woman who lacks intimacy in her life. While she sees her domestic help having sex with her husband on her bed, she does not view it as a crime. Domestic workers in India have been an exploited section of unorganized labor and are often subjected to everyday humiliation in Indian homes. The viewer might expect Isheeta (played by Tilottama Shome) to fire her help for using her bed and bringing her husband inside her bedroom. But she doesn’t. She simply runs out of her own apartment and waits for the couple to leave. And then, every afternoon, she comes home to watch them make love in her bedroom.

There’s the female gaze that’s so absent from Indian screens.

What’s even better is that the sex scenes do not include nudity or vulgarity. Sex scenes in movies often capitalize on the woman’s body and portray it as a way to appease men. It’s all orchestrated for the male gaze. That is why millennials and Gen-Z have grown up on a dirty diet of excessive nudity and vulgarity as the definition of sex. For a country as sexually regressive as India, sex has always been a forbidden topic, never to be discussed and always to be taken as a Richter scale for judgment. Sex is a male forte, and women are to be providers of sex, not consumers. 

Women and Sex 

It’s quite sad to see the portrayal of women and sex in movies that cater to heterosexual males only. Porn, too, has followed the same path and remained largely a male bastion. For the longest time, censorship was heavy for movies that explored sexualities and offered a different perspective on marriage, infidelity, and hetero-normative relationships. While Indian literature is replete with women who show extraordinary courage and reclaim their bodies and sex lives, our movies have been slow in showcasing it on screen. Attacks by fringe groups, unwarranted censorship, unnecessary controversies, and stereotypical attitudes within the movie industry towards the actors starring in such movies make it even more difficult to make such movies. 

We have come a long way from flowers touching each other to showing a sex signal on the screen. But there’s a lot more to be done. For example, none of the other stories in Lust Stories 2 are as powerful as The Mirror. Such anthologies and movies are largely limited to OTT platforms because they might never receive a U/A rating for the big screen. And political outrage over such movies as well as the vilification of female actors starring in them continues to affect their frequency. 

It’s always a pleasure (in more than one way) to see actors like Amruta Subhash play a character that looks at herself in the mirror and admires it. When have we seen women admire their bodies and themselves for their own sake? It’s always about appeasing men or competing with fellow women in jealousy. Letting sex be just another pleasurable act needs to be normalized. And maybe then, we might not judge women who express desire, something that’s very basic in every human being. 

Article Courtesy of Neha Jha

Feature Image from Lust Stories 2 via Netflix