Censorship,
Cinema, Film exhibition, Gender, Women, Feminism, Freedom of
Expression, Homosexuality, Gays, Lesbians
No
Attachment
Languages -English
Place - New Delhi
Source - The Campaign For Lesbian
Rights Refer link :
Author/s :
V.S
Date - 01-08-1999
Record #A0230414
A Lesbian Critique of
Fire.... Today it has become impossible to separate
the politics of protest, sexual rights and artistic expression from the actual
images of the controversial film Fire which supposedly is and is nor about
lesbianism, depending upon who is attacking or defending it. The Canada-based
director herself has skilfully adopted the politics of convenience, selling her
product through gay and lesbian channels in the
West, where the film has received awards and accolades for its supposedly
progressive depiction of women rebelling against hetero-patriarchal oppression.
However, here "at home" in India, the director explicitly denied that the film
had a lesbian theme, quickly clarified to the press that she was heterosexual,
and reportedly said that she would be devastated if her daughter turned out to
be lesbian. The director's hypocrisy, defensiveness and retreat into the safe
shelter of her heterosexuality has not deceived Indian lesbians and gays for
even a moment. We are well aware that we have been rigorously exploited and
commodified as subject matter. The fallout of the demonstration outside New
Delhi's Regal Cinema on December 7, 1998, and the fractures and dissension
within the solidarity of those who participated, has been discussed elsewhere in
this report. I will restrict myself to a brief comment on my experience of
viewing the film itself, which in many ways is as problematic as the Shiv Sena's
homophobic assaults on its screenings.
As frame
followed frame, I began to experience a sense of growing alienation from the
narrative being played out on the screen. This may have been because it swiftly
became obvious that the director was alienated from the central dilemma of the
"non-lesbian" "lesbian" sisters-in-law around whom the plot is centred. There
was absolutely no exploration of the immense frustration and tension that comes
from the overwhelming strain of trying to nurture an intimate sexual bond in a
crowded household without privacy, autonomy or mobility, as is the case in so
many families where doors cannot be locked or separate beds claimed. Most gays
and lesbians in the Indian social context will testify to the psychological
repercussions of being denied a reasonable space in which to spend sexual time
with a lover. Nor does Fire attempt to probe the profound guilt, shock, fear,
anger, shame, crippling ambivalences and equivocations and other anarchic and
threatening emotions that accompany sexual practices generally considered
perverted, criminal and taboo.
The critical
question of what constitutes the lesbian! gay!
transgender/ transsexual "self" (if there is such a thing), and how we work
these selves into our daily existence as social and political creatures, a
question we queers grapple with all our lives, simply glides past the
consciousness of our screen "non-lesbian" "lesbian" lovers shackled in their
respective sexless and loveless marriages. The sisters-in-law are too busy
looking beautiful as they spread saris to dry on their terrace while the
exoticised tapestry of congested, ritual-ornamented middle-class life somehow
stitches itself into being within the household and in the lanes below. The
director carefully keeps our heroines at a lyric distance from the anguish and
the euphoria of lesbian social realitie s, as well as
from each other (the brief sex scene was as appealing as watered milk), from
their uncaring husbands, and most of all from the excruciating but essential
project of claiming some kind of stable selfhood once the layers of illusion,
and the illusory protections these offer, are peeled away, violently,
unpredictably, and often invisibly.
The
director's commitment to inauthenticity becomes even more transparent through
her rampant use of "othering" devices. The film opens and closes with the image
of Muslim monuments in imperial marble and common stone—the Taj Mahal, a
legendary celebration of heterosexual love, and the Sufi dargah of Nizamuddin
Auliya, refuge of the destitute and the despairing, as well as of poets and
agonised emperors. The director inserts parodic representations of scenes from
the Ramayana in various fragmented forms as a comment on the "realistic"
narrative, throughout the film. The characters are further "othered" by being
depicted as victims—through class (the blackmailing, masturbating servant who
exposes the lesbian love affair to the household), through infirmity (the mute,
paralysed, old mother-in-law, privileged witness of the servant's ejaculations)
or through the addiction to modes of excess (the brutal younger brother rents
out pornographic videos while his "oriental" mistress dreams about emigrating to
the Far East); the tormented elder brother fixates on a guru and arbitrarily
imposes Gandhian experiments in celibacy upon his wife). The sisters-in-law are
excessive, of course, because they are "non-lesbian"
"lesbians".
Where are the fully-fleshed,
psychologically convincing individuals in this tableau of two-dimensional
pathologies? Where is the reliable index of "normalcy", empathetic and balanced
articulation, nuanced logic, sensitive descriptions of queer realities? Perhaps
as a disempowered minority we simply do nor matter to the director except as
compelling and profitable subject matter. As a lesbian spectator I found the
film so plastic, the aestheticism so deliberate, the satire so laboured, that to
argue whether Fire is lesbian-themed or not is as circuitous and futile as
insisting that a doughnut is defined by its fat ring of fried pastry, not its
hole. Go Back back
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