FOR ADULTS ONLY

What is so 'Adult' really about LSD or Dev D? And how are they any more adult than other Bollywood films? 
Aakshi Magazine Delhi

My teenager cousin told me that her friend was shocked by Dibakar Banerjee's Love Sex aur Dhokha (LSD) -because it showed everything. When I think about it, she probably meant the blurred out sex scene. 

On a news channel, censor board chairperson Sharmila Tagore commented on the absurdity of the film's director, Dibakar Banerjee, wanting a 'U/A' certificate. She said she "knew" what is and is not acceptable for children and youngsters. This was said with a sense of finality not misplaced coming from someone who heads a body that has the power of too much interference in all fiction and non-fiction films seeking a release in India. With the moral-legal backing of being in "societal interest".The same censor board certifies as 'universal' regressive worldviews on everything - women, love, sexuality, class and caste - every Friday in a theatre. The accepted-acceptable ideas for whose perpetuation the board functions are these dominant ideas of our time that are defended in the name of "societal interest" even though they are oppressive to so many people and desires.

What is so 'adult' really about LSD (or Dev D)? And how are they any more 'adult' than other Bollywood films?This interests me more because when I was growing up, 

I did not really have access to films that were offering alternatives to conventional and inherently oppressive ways of being in the world. I grew up on the Bollywood of the 1990s. At one point, I remember my friends and I saw Aditya Chopra's Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ) several times. What this must have done to our sense of the world, I don't completely know yet.  I am still unlearning. 

I did not grow up on today's mainstream Bollywood that knows sophisticated ways of masking its inherent conservativeness. Most of these films function with the facade of being 'progressive'. One of these facades that has been gradually mastered over the years is to do with gender. Here, the presence of women  characters who seem more in control than before and more confident in displaying their 'sexualised bodies', only ends up endorsing regressive ideas on female desire and gender roles.

For instance, Fashion is a paranoid look at the fate of middle-class girls who dare venture into the evil world of 'fashion'. It unhesitatingly upholds suffocating ideas on women and morality - middle-class defined. It seems to argue that women can't handle professions where they are in control, are sexually confident, and have all the fame and money that men in the same profession are incidentally shown as easily handling. Why Kangana Ranaut's character becomes a drug addict and how it's linked to her career as a ramp model, remains unclear. 

Throughout the film, a link is established between the act of smoking and the evolution of Priyanka Chopra's character, as she moves from being innocent to corrupted by power and desire, and, devastated by a sexual encounter (because it is with a 'black' man - outrightly racist), to, finally, make a reformed and middle class morals intact fight back into the industry.

Another film: Kambhakt Ishq. Kareena Kapoor's apparently liberated 'modern' confident character is a man-hater - that alone makes her a 'feminist'. This character justifies her so-called feminism because her father had left her mother when she was young. Only to realise later that her mother had lied to her and it was the other way round! This makes her sum up the film's misogynist politics in a monologue: "Mujhe maaf kar do... mujhe laga tha ki main apna khayaal khud rakh sakti hoon... lekin main galat thi..." (Forgive me. I thought I could take care of myself. I was wrong.)