Ritu accused of...

Ritu accused of 'po*no'

For the explicit love-making scenes in Antar Mahal

Subhash K Jha

Post Antar Mahal, director Rituparno Ghosh finds himself in the midst of controversy. "A section of Bengalis think my Antar Mahal is po*nographic. They fail to understand why I've gone into explicit love-making scenes. What they see as graphic love-making is nothing but the ritual of clinical sex between an uncaring husband and an unresponsive frightened wife. The so-called po*nography is as titillating in my film as child abuse or wife-beating. The act of love-making within the feudal ambience of Antar Mahal is symptomatic of female repression. Of course, the love-making scenes are clumsy. They're meant to be, simply because they're not about love but insensitive male lust."

But despite his justifications, large sections of Bengal and Assam haven't perceived Ritu's erotica in the spirit that he wanted them to. A filmmaker from Mumbai is outraged by Antar Mahal. "It's a shockingly bad script from short story by a revered master-writer Tarashankar Bandhopadhyay. And Ritu shows extreme arrogance by crediting the source material as, 'narrative core'. How could he ignore, insult and twist a great classic in such a dismissive and irreverent manner? I've nothing personally against Ritu. I loved his Raincoat, Chokher Bali and other earlier works. But critics should stop building Davids into Goliaths."

Ritu remains unfazed. "I knew I was going to face brickbats for Antar Mahal. It is a sexually explicit subject. Every time a film goes into forbidden areas of the human psyche the filmmaker gets brickbats. When Aparna Sen showed the housewife in Paroma being unrepentant about her extra-marital affair, Bengal frowned. But we've to learn to accept change in the audience and in filmmakers."