'Call My Agent: Bollywood'| Do Queer Relationships Always Need to Stand Out?

It's high time we try to stop 'normalising' queer relationships.

The latest debacle being dished out by Netflix is Call My Agent Bollywood. A remake of the incredible French show Dix Pour Cent, the desi version gets *everything* wrong. Tacky sets, terrible costumes (pullovers and jackets in Mumbai weather?!), token characters, unfunny dialogues - it’s a long eye roll for six episodes. If this isn’t enough, there’s a sleazy, nauseous depiction of lesbian romance. What the OG series did was seamlessly fuse the relationship into the story. It doesn’t stand out, nor is it a blink and miss. But trust our content creators to completely ruin that experience too.

Reduced Only to Sexual Orientation

There’s absolutely no redeeming factor in Call My Agent Bollywood. Despite being a word-by-word remake of Dix Pour Cent, the Shaad Ali-directorial does not even get one joke right. One hugely problematic aspect is Amal (Ahana Kumra) and Jasleen’s (Anuschka Sawhney) relationship.

In the original show, the relationship between agent Andrea Martel (Camille Cotin) and auditor Collette (Ophélia Kolb) was incidental. Andrea wasn’t defined by her sexual identity. She hits off on a wrong note with Collette, then tries to seduce her to cover up the misuse of company funds, only to realise that she is actually in love with her.

Amal, a woman who randomly throws in ‘mohotarma’ and ‘janab’ to remind the viewers every minute that she is Muslim, is nothing like Andrea. She is shown as a sex-crazy lesbian who has to throw in expletives every now and then to assert her authority. The sex scenes between Amal and Jasleen are particularly jarring. A seduction involves Amal almost shoving her butt in Jasleen’s face and there’s a horrendous scene wherein Amal squeezes Jasleen’s half-naked butt on a couch. There’s no intimacy between the hyper-sexualised characters - they solely exist to satiate the male gaze. A stray scene showing two women kissing in the heart of Mumbai doesn’t qualify as nuanced narrative.

At times taking a stance and at times not even hiding its intent, let’s see how Hindi films and shows have approached queer relationships:

Brave Yet Grim Portrayals

Fire was the first mainstream Indian film to explore homosexual love. The film follows two sisters-in-law, belonging to a conservative household, who fall in love with each other. Their relationship isn’t incidental, it existed to make the society aware about queer relationships. The family drama is a study of the conservative society - represented by a home - wherein rules and ideas are challenged.

The lovemaking scenes between Radha and Sita have been treated with great sensitivity, and the film paved way for movies like My Brother Nikhil and I Am. Abhishek Chaubey’s Dedh Ishqiya (inspired by Ishmat Chughtai’s Lihaaf), too, explored the story of two women falling in love in the paling splendours of a palace. All these are great stories about queer relationships and they were penned at a time when it was a still a taboo subject, but in each of them the pair has to go through insurmountable challenges to come out and find comfort.

Comic Relief

For years, Bollywood has used queer characters to provide comic relief in a heteronormative script. Relationships did not even make it to the screen. Take, for instance, the 1998 movie Prem Aggan. One of the sequences has the female lead saying "Tumhara naam Jay Mehta nahi, gay Mehta hona chahiye tha" (You should have been called gay Mehta instead of Jay Mehta) to a passerby who offers to help her. Effeminism was equated to being gay.

Eventually, when romance between homosexual people started permeating screens, they were made the objects of ridicule. Remember Kal Ho Na Ho (2003)? Karan Johar, who himself identifies as someone from the community, sketched a homophobic character Kanta Ben, who would suffer convulsions every time she encountered two straight men Aman (Shah Rukh Khan) and Rohit (Saif Ali Khan) giving out suggestive signals of being intimate just to irritate her.

Aman and Rohit pretending to be gay was meant solely to elicit laughs. Loud mannerisms by the duo and dramatically-hyped background music to emphasise Kanta Ben’s scary thought that her beloved Rohit baba might be gay made for a totally unnecessary comic subplot in an otherwise emotionally-charged movie.

Rishi Kapoor’s character in Student of the Year was a nightmare, to say the least. The gay school principal wears glossy pink ties, lusts after the sports coach and is laughed at by the students. Did we really need this in 2012?

Where is The Representation?

Dostana (2006) addressed the elephant in the room when homosexuality was a crime in India, and that deserves to be credited. However, it went out of its way to ensure that an authentic LGBTQIA relationship is avoided. Set in Miami, two straight men, Kunal (John Abraham) and Sam (Abhishek Bachchan) are so desperate to rent an apartment owned by a single woman Neha (Priyanka Chopra), that they pretend to be gay. Eventually both of them fall in love with Neha, complicating things further. But she, in turn, encourages them to flirt with her gay boss (Boman Irani), who would dress in garish outfits.

The very portrayal of gay people as ONLY loud, flamboyant characters demarcated them from the cis male (Bobby Deol), who was shown as suave and reserved.

Time and again, Dostana also showed Kunal and Sam to be perpetually anxious that they might actually be perceived as gay. They casually equated ‘acting gay’ to ‘acting like girls’, and would gape at the prospect of basic interactions with heterosexual men. Then came the question of representation. How can the film claim to be inclusive when both the protagonists do not even belong to the community?

Rare Instances of Fulfilment

Bidding adieu to over-the-top and under-the-belt queer narratives, Made in Heaven came and conquered our hearts. Arjun Mathur aka Karan is a gay wedding planner. What’s so special about this? The answer is that there IS nothing special. Karan is the everyday man. He can be the person standing right beside you in the shop. He can be your relative, your friend, your brother. He plays video games, attends queer get-togethers, wears tees as well as ornate designer clothes, has lots of sex with men, misses his ex, is in debt and is struggling to come out to his parents. Nothing in Karan’s narrative screams for attention. His relationship is intimate - it is filled with warmth, fear, love.

Made in Heaven does not have one token gay person. There are gay men about to be married, those who are married, those who are in same-sex marriages and then those who don’t want to get married. There are several layers to their personalities. But it doesn’t stop at that. Depicting a time when Section 377 wasn’t repealed yet, the show makes Karan stand up for himself and the rights of the community in three brilliant episodes. Karan is not a token comic relief - he is important, his views are important and he has a right to exist on his own terms - that’s where the series scores.

The light-hearted Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, too, tugs at the heartstrings. Hitesh Kewalya’s film does not follow the usual path associated with queer narratives - of a character realising they are a misfit or fighting to come out. Here, the stage is set from the beginning.

We meet Kartik Singh (Ayushmann Khurrana) and Aman Tripathi (Jitendra Kumar) as a couple, one helping the other board a train. They are in superhero costumes, challenging the hyper-masculinity associated with superheroes. Kartik and Aman are very much in love, but hell breaks loose when they are discovered by Aman’s father kissing on a train.

What follows is a comedy about the family trying to come to terms with this ‘disaster’. Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan chooses a love story, a medium we have always identified with, to reach out. The tone isn’t judgemental. It does not demonise the older generation for being homophobic. Instead, it chooses to educate them. Kartik and Aman’s faith in each other is unwavering, and Kewalya does not want us to debate on the right to choose who to love. The message is simple - there shouldn't be a need to 'normalise' same-sex relationship, it is no different than any other romantic relationship.

Sonam Kapoor-starrer Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga had immense potential in exploring the same-sex relationship, but it barely scratched the surface.

‘Too Accustomed to See Queer Love Stories Put in Jeopardy’

A recent show which has been hailed for its approach towards queer relationships is the Emmy Award-winning Schitt’s Creek. In it David (Dan Levy) and Patrick (Noah Reid) are *the* couple. Their struggles are not defined by their sexual identities.

Speaking about the appreciation that this lens received creator Dan Levy said in an interview, “I think because we're so accustomed to seeing queer love stories that are put in jeopardy by outside forces… any time you see two queer people in love, there has to be some kind of consequence. So to propose a world where there is no consequence, and two people can love each other sort of wholly...and ultimately show that what comes from that is freedom and love and joy. It's a form, I guess, of sort of quiet protest, saying that this is how things should be”.

Levy's statement reminds us of She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not from the otherwise forgettable anthology Feels Like Ishq. It's just another love story, relieved of the burden of trying to bring about some 'change'.

So, does merely increasing visibility in Hindi films and shows ensure that people from the LGBTQIA community are represented accurately? How often do they get to experience love and fulfilment? These are questions that should be pondered on.