I was excited at the prospect of Karan Johar taking on a substantive role in a film. With his penchant for nuancing his own films with gay elements, I was hoping to see a performance that was riddled with gay inflections, if it was not totally gay itself.
What a sore disappointment! Johar allows Anurag Kashyap to play to the same lazy, tired tropes about homosexuals that we have come to expect from Hindi cinema. The closeted gay man who marries a woman he then pimps out; the sly sex seeker who does not have the audacity to demand more than a slight touch involving fingers; the comic villain who, even as he hatches plots to kill the protagonist, complains about having been overlooked by him in favour of the lady love … the list is practically endless.
I was surprised at the sudden bonhomie between Kashyap and Johar when they had decided to work together on Bombay Velvet. They come from such different schools of cinema that the only way they would have decided to work together, I wagered, was if Kashyap had offered Johar a part in which the latter could significantly explore his sexuality. And I had decided to give Kashyap the benefit of the doubt. I had looked forward to a movie where Johar would finally play a sensitively portrayed gay character. I can't tell you how happy I am that the film has turned out to be a rotten jumble of plot loopholes and harrumphed direction. If it had been anywhere close to the master class that was Gangs of Wasseypur, the caricature that is Johar's Kaizad Khambatta would have especially hurt.
The bare bones of the plot have by now been discussed threadbare. Khambatta takes Johnny Balraj, a product of the red light district, under his wings. Played by Ranbir Kapoor, Balraj is willing to do anything to be a "big shot", starting with being exploited by Khambatta. There are suggestions galore that Khambatta uses Balraj for his sexual pleasure, but nothing that confirms this fact. All we get to see is stuff like Johar giving Balraj the moniker "Johnny" after ogling long and hard at his crotch.
It could have grown from there to be a sustainable, if edgy, romance between the two male protagonists. Instead, what we get is an all-surface love story between Balraj and Rosie Noronha, a jazz singer played by the talented Anushka Sharma, who, however, never really comes into her own as this character. Her story starts with grim moodiness and suddenly somersaults to heightened passion and then, as with all women who happen to find themselves in gangster flicks, returns to a dull denouement.
Johar does play Khambatta well, given the limited scope of the character. An oily wheeler-dealer, he knows whom to tap to get his work done, as the Bombay of yore is spliced to yield the metropolis of today. He moves among the high and mighty, knows their weaknesses fully well and exploits his connections to get the best deal. The movie looks very good and, as for the underground homosexual, perhaps captures a truth of the times in the character of Khambatta. But it breaks no new ground. It is merely another film in which the homosexual, if not a rotten weakling, is a consummate player who games the system. To that extent, Kashyap might be lauded for writing a wily player, not a wuss.
But there the expectations must stop. The Khambatta story will, of course, end suitably - but we will not know, of course, what happens to his wife, a glamorous model whose plasticity is the perfect foil to the sham marriage she is in. We, of course, will not know about any of Khambatta's other lovers, men who make no appearance in the film. We know only the fate of his one true love, Johnny Balraj, whom he finishes as Balraj finishes him, and we will laugh our way out of the cinema halls about the lunacy of it all. Bombay Velvet is a deeply gay film. If only its director, whom we extol as one of our best, had let it live and breathe as one.
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