Loving a lesbian : Ek ladki ko dekha to aisa laga

Screenshot from Chitthiye video

"My sister is queer.. I don't know what she will do" the young man of Indian origins told me , in a quiet matter-of-fact way. He and his family were returning to India.

I am thinking of his sister, and him as I laughed and went 'Wow' and got angry several times watching  Ek ladki ko dekha to aisa laga.

The film does not have any hot Lesbian love scenes.  And they do not kill off the lesbians like what happened in Fire. There is a hint of the heroine 'ending it all' , a Bollywood theme.

The film is about, Sweety,  a woman who loves a woman,  and her relationship with different men and her grandmother who love her. 

The director Shelly Chopra Dhar said this was not meant to be an LGBTQ love story. There are stories about LGBTQ characters in Indian cinema, and some love stories. Many of them end with death, as happens in real life.

There are some poweful moments in the dialogue, laughter and wit generated in some of the serious moments. The co-writer Gazal Dhaliwal, was born as Gunraj but later transitioned to a woman. So the powerful moments in the film have some of the real life experiences of one of the writers.


Men...
"If you watch those cooking shows, you will become a woman", Beeji tells her son as she takes the TV remote control from him and puts it into her bosom. Her son wants to be a chef but is instead a businessman making underwear and other clothes.   Her son is Sweety's father, one of the men who has to come around eventually. And the real life father -daughter duo of Anil and Sonam Kapoor do well in acting out this trauma.  Sahil runs with Sweety as she evades her brother. Sahil falls in love with Sweety and instead of the harassment and violence that have characterised a lot of bollywood love, Sahil eventually asks to be her friend.  The brother Virji though seems more concerned about the shame and so on.. I am protecting her, and there is a hint of the men, a reminder of the men,  who have killed their sisters and daughters to deal with 'shame'.

India..

The director said the film was set in a small town, not a big city. Sweety wears 'Indian' clothes throughout the film. I think the most powerful part of the film, is when Sweety 'comes out' to Sahil, in the gurudwara  (Sikh temple).  The gurudwara is where Sweety had prayed for God to change her. the gurudwara is where Sweety tells a man her truth.

"I will get into trouble" Sahil tells Sweety as he hugs her, while holding his palms together for two older men who are passing. So our hero saves his love, in a different way.



"Would you try this .. ?"
Anil Kapoor, the old  man who is finding love with Chatro the woman who divorced to live her life. He pours a drink and offers her, and she looks surprised. She might not have had liquor before. There is something about Bollywood and how it does liquor, pouring liquor down the throats of all the heroes and heroines, the stars. The 'Muslim' hero gets drunk and has to apologise the next day.. the irony of course that Islam is less tolerant of alcohol than Hinduism is.

Bollywood, with its colourism - dark skinned people are absent from the films,, with its invoking of suicide as a noble way out of whatever trauma, and with this recent insistence that alcohol is a good thing, is held as a cultural model for coolie people in Guyana and elsewhere. And while Bollywood took on the story of a family dealing with a same-sex loving daughter and sister, and takes on many other social issues.. some things remain the same.

The film is not making money at the box office. There were four of us in the large cinema. The directors and producers took a risk. Maybe they did not want to make big money.

The final scene of the film is based on a play which Sahil directs. People leave the play in anger, some stay behind.  There is a beautiful shot of a young girl, crying at the end of the play. The meaning is clear, if this play, like maybe the film, is not a money maker, is not popular, it does not matter if it helps to give hope to any one person who witnesses it.

At the end of the film, Sweety tells Sahil to take his play everywhere, to the villages and small towns. The message is that the play, like maybe this film, would help families to accept their LGBTQ relatives.

 I leave the film , guilty that I am feeling nice and warm and fuzzy, after seeing a nice film, complicit in the prejudices of the industry that produced the nice feeling. I want to see it again.

Love
In the film not everyone loves the lesbian. The brother in the film walks out of the closing scene.

I asked the brother who told me about the sister who he did not abandon,  what his parents would do.

"My parents are nice people" the young man said "I am sure they would not abandon her".

And that hopefully will be the real life story of many other lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer people around the world.