badhaai do & filmfare and how it affects the queer movement
badhaai do won 6 filmfare awards!! and apart from that, 14 nominations. this is such a welcome surprise to me considering how much the filmfare panders to popular films and celebrities. while i'm convinced that best actor in a supporting role was robbed from gulshan devaiah (who played guru) as well as best dialogues + best director, let's not dwell on that negativity.
the war to get same-sex marriage is still on. and i'd like to thank the team for dedicating their awards to the queer community.
for those who have been complaining yet again that this was a profitable venture for the people involved, think again about how much it tanked in the box office. and yes, bhumi pednekar has addressed the on-going legal battle for same sex marriage here.
i would ask for jaded queer individuals like me to step back and think that there are different ways of coming together to support a social cause. making an entire film is one of them. green lighting such a film is one of them. acting in such a film is one of them. considering what the extremely homophobic government is capable of, we must take all such things into account. and when queer icons like onir also come out in support of badhaai do (btw his red carpet look on filmfare >>>), we should take a page from their book to see where they are coming from.
also i went and checked out the team behind badhaai do (not just the actors). apparently the director (harshavardhan kulkarni) and the editor (kirti nakhwa) are already in hot soup with the government since they returned a NATIONAL AWARD a few years back. their reason? the growing intolerance of the government.
kinda iconic.
and a reminder that this is the same government that routinely sends journalists, activists, historians to jail while dabbling in the same fields and falsifying facts and history. (lmao calling our trauma an "urban elite" problem is so ironic considering they are the urban elites).
badhaai do getting the second highest number of filmfare awards is one of the many victories that we have secured. please remind yourself to not alienate any sort of support whatsoever just because it doesn't fit the stereotypical narrative of activism. and after all, activism in art is the most powerful of its kind, is it not?
badhaai do: how some of us from the queer community missed its point
I've been back after 9213049 years to announce that y'all MUST watch Badhaai Do, it's literally the most beautiful form of queer representation I've seen. another thing, ignore those who say there are zero queer people involved.
a few spoilers ahead, so please watch the movie before reading this :))
1. the script consultant is queer.
2. the people in the pride parade (which had the unfortunate straight flag in the trailer) were queer. I saw plenty of instagram stories by those in there, posting about it, and checked out their profiles. if they didn't spot it, that means not all queer people keep up with news that makes them sad lol.
3. the girl who hands the mask to Shardul was his sister-in-law, also queer.
4. we also don't know for sure whether there aren't any other queer people involved in the making, so let's not just assume that only the hets were a part of this.
and check out the interviews by the crew - they have mentioned more than once that they showed this film to a LOT of queer people, showed the script to a lot of queer people too. the script consultant recently mentioned just how far the writers and directors went to keep it as sincere as possible. that doesn't sound like "rainbow capitalism to me". that doesn't sound like capitalizing off queer suffering.
i, for one, can see some sincere and genuine effort put in by people who are not even gay. we got a pride anthem, some solid gay-lesbian solidarity (#sumiandshardulbesties5ever), realistic queer romance, and several milestones in Indian cinema too, I think (I do not recall a blood test being portrayed as sensual in bollywood before OH MY GOD). i remember tearing up at sumi's father destroying her (and me) with the singular line: "mere ghar me hi kyu?" (why does it have to be at my home AKA why does it have to be my daughter?). i remember the joy of seeing a pride parade and my date bawling like a child watching sumi and rhimjhim run underneath the rainbow. i had to watch it more than once to fully understand the little details and the subtleties of the characters. some of my favourites are:
1. rhimjhim blowing kisses at shardul during the pride (hints at the start of the second half, when shardul blows her kisses)
2. guru giving such a fruity kick to shardul it melts my heart dkjsfji
3. not all members of the family are present in the last scene. taiji and sumi's mother are absent, another unnamed aunt, shardul's nieces, etc. but we see her brother, who was the one who called her a "pervert". character growth there and we dont need to get into how it happened. this is not about them, after all.
5. sumi wearing the red glasses to not let shardul's coworkers find out that she's a part of the parade.
6. the walkie-talkie during the scene with shardul's superior and his wife visiting them for tea is blaring about loud, barking dogs and the dialogues SEND ME.
7. kabir's text messages. you really need to pause to read them but they're so sus (i think he might be cheating? idk)
basically, it ages like an evergreen forest.
i didn't expect to walk into the theatre to watch an arthouse, indie film. at its core, what badhaai do has achieved is something phenomenal - it has retained what defines a bollywood movie while simultaneously portraying queer relationships as something not extraordinary or reserved for the "woke" segments of society. the characters aren't just their sexualities and sumi says it herself: "hissa hain, puri zindagi kaha hain." (trans: it's just a part of us, not our entire life.) shardul slaps his lover, kabir is an asshole, sumi decimates her partner's career, rhimjhim makes assumptions on shardul's sexuality, etc. it is bad enough that i have to sit through homophobes calling this as a disgusting film filled with obscene scenes, giving their low-iq opinions on why it's wrong. now i have to sit through seasoned, jaded queer individuals like me, give some of the worst reasons to cancel a film and call it problematic?
The characters are not pinnacles of perfection and I'm here for it. I don't want a cardboard vincian protagonist. some
of the reviewers clearly don't understand what nuance is and I'm okay with that. some of us who have grateful access to resources and inner pride meetings forget that there are those still in closet, those who still don't know that gender is a social construct. that we still live in a country which has some of the most homophobic outlooks. sure, homophobia was a concept popularized by the British, but are we really going to forget that there are scriptures dated BC that have specific laws for punishing lesbians? homophobia has been as rooted in our culture as the urge to search for a suitable groom for a girl the minute she comes of age (the number may change with each passing century, but does it really matter?).
those that go as far as the city's outskirts for a chance to live a life free from the heteronormative eye. there are also those who want a child as their own. what's so heteronormative about that? what's so heteronormative about wanting to be a mother? are we seriously going to nitpick on the littlest things? and let us not forget that guru isn't at all interested in the child. he states this himself and is hesitant to join Shardul until he is told that it is just to be by his side. the ending is not meant to be perfect. heck, I would go as far as to say that the true ending was when it was just Sumi and Shardul with the child. perhaps the filmmakers wanted to offer us a happy ending, or at least, a bittersweet one. and i will quote the director from his interview with PeepingMoon: "they never really come out of the closet. instead, the closet just gets bigger."
this is coming from someone still in the closet, living in a somewhat conservative society and still grasping with their own gender identity. my closet keeps getting bigger, with the recent addition of my mother to it. watching this movie encouraged me to come out to her and my mother to give some of most supportive words a queer child can hear. and for that, i cannot thank Badhaai Do and its makers enough for it.
considering making a good old fashioned review about qala since i have many, many thoughts about this film and none of them are positive lol (fair warning, i don't like this film).
i will touch on finer aspects like acting and performing classical music (since i am someone who's trained in hindustani music for 14 years). would you be interested in reading it?
lmao im not going to name names, but there was this instagram page which kept giving the opinion "good queer films by queer people like onir are the ones getting flagged while crap like badhaai do gets greenlit". like dude, you did not just make a valid point while bringing down another film lmao. also they posted this at the time the movie hadn't released. anyways this article came on my timeline and it's poetic justice at its finest and possibly the biggest defense i can give badhaai do:
mark racist, kim wooshik racist, jimin whitewashing himself on the gram, twice negotiations, (ik them pulling an snsd will probably hurt but it's what jype deserves honestly — get that bag jeongyeon!!) and ao3 writers using ai in fics; it's been a great time for me and my personal interests 😍😍
