Dunno Y… Na Jaane Kyun, India’s Brokeback Mountain
This entry was posted on September 1, 2010 at 1:45 PM and is filed under the ugly. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
2 Responses to “Dunno Y… Na Jaane Kyun, India’s Brokeback Mountain”
When will Bollywood offer a realistic portrayal of relationships?
Bollywood rarely treats sex and relationships with any honesty, so I was intrigued to see two films that tackle these subjects at the Indian Film Festival of London last weekend.
The first, Mr Singh Mrs Mehta, was a dreary attempt at French-style arthouse with lots of moody silences, depicting the love affair that develops between the titular characters after they find out their respective spouses are cheating with each other.
Almost nothing happens throughout this pedestrian movie. The only point of interest is why these characters are so bothered by the fact that their ghastly partners have copped off with each other. Ashwin is married to an overly made-up, big-haired shoulder-padded, corporate “uber-bitch”, while Neera pines for a bouffant-wearing, shiny-suited douche bag who looks and acts like something out of an Indian version of Abigail’s Party.
Ashwin smokes lots of roll-ups while Neera sheds many tears and exposes her buttocks as he paints a yellow Picasso-esque portrait of her with enormous thighs. Finally, Ashwin’s wife falls back in love with him, realising what a great artist he is, and Neera tells her husband to sod off. With a story that moves at a glacial pace, this isn’t a film with much to say, other than how reticent Indian cinema still is when it comes to talking about infidelity.
The second film I saw left me gobsmacked. Billed as Bollywood’s Brokeback Mountain, it had a cynical British audience in stitches for almost two and a half hours. The title, Dunno Y … Na Jaane Kyun, is as muddled as the film itself, being both textspeak and Hindi for the same thing: “Don’t know why. It’s the story of a family of Mumbai Christians, in which the eldest son, Ashley (Yuvraj Parashar), is a closet homosexual.
With Hindi and English dialogue, it has some of the most unintentionally hilarious lines I’ve heard in ages. At a birthday party, an elderly uncle spills noodles into the cleavage of a busty old dame, before making a Carry On style attempt to tidy her up, leading to his exquisite head-wobbling outburst: “I am trying to clean and you are calling me arsehole!” Not even a blacked up Peter Sellers could match that.
Ashley’s mother has two boyfriends in the hope of getting one of them to buy her youngest daughter a “scooty”. She and Ashley have a long anguished discussion about how they can club together and buy one for her, in which Ashley makes detailed perorations on the merits of Mumbai’s public transportation system, while his mother insists that her daughter must have a “scooty” because all of her friends have their own means of “personal conveyance”.
Then Ashley’s cancer-stricken father, played by the gravel-voiced Kabir Bedi, returns to the family home having abandoned them more than a decade ago to live in an ashram. Trying to explain his actions to his son, he tells Ashley that he’d wanted to do so much with his life “but just didn’t have the balls”. Then he sits the lad down and passes him an envelope. “Take this negligible sum of money,” he says, hoping to make up for his previous behaviour.
Ashley’s brother is in love with Ashley’s wife, and wants her to live with him in Dubai, but their secret tryst is nothing compared with what Ashley is keeping under his hat.
Halfway through the movie, what appears to be a boring family saga cuts to what looks like a Roman orgy with pole-dancing transvestites and semi-naked young men grinding their hips together on the dancefloor. Here we meet a wannabe actor and prostitute, played by Kapil Sharma, who we see perform oral sex on an old man before becoming the object of Ashley’s affections after they go on a blind date.
They fall madly in love, but Ashley’s lover tells him to sacrifice their happiness in order to maintain the honour and integrity of his family – especially his daughter, as “society will mock her”. Ashley returns to his wife, and his boyfriend goes back on the game before hitting it big in the movies.
Though the film brings gay characters to the fore, it still has all of Bollywood’s worst traits: terrible writing, clumsy editing and appalling acting. It’s more likely to be a camp cult hit than serious ground-breaking cinema. The gay love affair is the most believable thing in the film, but that’s not saying much at all. The laughter of the audience bordered on outright cruelty.
Adultery and homosexuality may be controversial themes for mainstream Indian cinema, but the unwillingness to invest in authentic scripts that can elicit plausible performances will continue to hold Bollywood back for a while to come.
not in realtion to this post or film—-nothing against homsexuality but do have qualms with equating it with “cool” or “avant garde”.
dont mind aruna shields though—didnt know she “exposes her buttocks as he paints a yellow Picasso-esque portrait of her with enormous thighs.”
SATYAMSHOT 
September 1, 2010 at 2:01 PM
Guardian:
When will Bollywood offer a realistic portrayal of relationships?
Bollywood rarely treats sex and relationships with any honesty, so I was intrigued to see two films that tackle these subjects at the Indian Film Festival of London last weekend.
The first, Mr Singh Mrs Mehta, was a dreary attempt at French-style arthouse with lots of moody silences, depicting the love affair that develops between the titular characters after they find out their respective spouses are cheating with each other.
Almost nothing happens throughout this pedestrian movie. The only point of interest is why these characters are so bothered by the fact that their ghastly partners have copped off with each other. Ashwin is married to an overly made-up, big-haired shoulder-padded, corporate “uber-bitch”, while Neera pines for a bouffant-wearing, shiny-suited douche bag who looks and acts like something out of an Indian version of Abigail’s Party.
Ashwin smokes lots of roll-ups while Neera sheds many tears and exposes her buttocks as he paints a yellow Picasso-esque portrait of her with enormous thighs. Finally, Ashwin’s wife falls back in love with him, realising what a great artist he is, and Neera tells her husband to sod off. With a story that moves at a glacial pace, this isn’t a film with much to say, other than how reticent Indian cinema still is when it comes to talking about infidelity.
The second film I saw left me gobsmacked. Billed as Bollywood’s Brokeback Mountain, it had a cynical British audience in stitches for almost two and a half hours. The title, Dunno Y … Na Jaane Kyun, is as muddled as the film itself, being both textspeak and Hindi for the same thing: “Don’t know why. It’s the story of a family of Mumbai Christians, in which the eldest son, Ashley (Yuvraj Parashar), is a closet homosexual.
With Hindi and English dialogue, it has some of the most unintentionally hilarious lines I’ve heard in ages. At a birthday party, an elderly uncle spills noodles into the cleavage of a busty old dame, before making a Carry On style attempt to tidy her up, leading to his exquisite head-wobbling outburst: “I am trying to clean and you are calling me arsehole!” Not even a blacked up Peter Sellers could match that.
Ashley’s mother has two boyfriends in the hope of getting one of them to buy her youngest daughter a “scooty”. She and Ashley have a long anguished discussion about how they can club together and buy one for her, in which Ashley makes detailed perorations on the merits of Mumbai’s public transportation system, while his mother insists that her daughter must have a “scooty” because all of her friends have their own means of “personal conveyance”.
Then Ashley’s cancer-stricken father, played by the gravel-voiced Kabir Bedi, returns to the family home having abandoned them more than a decade ago to live in an ashram. Trying to explain his actions to his son, he tells Ashley that he’d wanted to do so much with his life “but just didn’t have the balls”. Then he sits the lad down and passes him an envelope. “Take this negligible sum of money,” he says, hoping to make up for his previous behaviour.
Ashley’s brother is in love with Ashley’s wife, and wants her to live with him in Dubai, but their secret tryst is nothing compared with what Ashley is keeping under his hat.
Halfway through the movie, what appears to be a boring family saga cuts to what looks like a Roman orgy with pole-dancing transvestites and semi-naked young men grinding their hips together on the dancefloor. Here we meet a wannabe actor and prostitute, played by Kapil Sharma, who we see perform oral sex on an old man before becoming the object of Ashley’s affections after they go on a blind date.
They fall madly in love, but Ashley’s lover tells him to sacrifice their happiness in order to maintain the honour and integrity of his family – especially his daughter, as “society will mock her”. Ashley returns to his wife, and his boyfriend goes back on the game before hitting it big in the movies.
Though the film brings gay characters to the fore, it still has all of Bollywood’s worst traits: terrible writing, clumsy editing and appalling acting. It’s more likely to be a camp cult hit than serious ground-breaking cinema. The gay love affair is the most believable thing in the film, but that’s not saying much at all. The laughter of the audience bordered on outright cruelty.
Adultery and homosexuality may be controversial themes for mainstream Indian cinema, but the unwillingness to invest in authentic scripts that can elicit plausible performances will continue to hold Bollywood back for a while to come.
LikeLike
September 1, 2010 at 2:48 PM
not in realtion to this post or film—-nothing against homsexuality but do have qualms with equating it with “cool” or “avant garde”.
dont mind aruna shields though—didnt know she “exposes her buttocks as he paints a yellow Picasso-esque portrait of her with enormous thighs.”
LikeLike