After Fawad, Ranbir open to play gay, but is Bollywood?

In a recent interview, Bollywood actor Ranbir Kapoor said that he would have been cautious about playing gay on screen in the past but Fawad Khan’s turn as a gay man in Kapoor & Sons has given him the confidence to take on such a role in future, should it come his way.

According to IANS, when asked if he would play a gay man on camera, Kapoor said: "Sure, but now it’s already been done. Now he’s (Fawad) opened the door and it’s easy for us to walk through it. But earlier, I must honestly say I might have turned it down."

In an interview to Indian Express last month (August), Shakun Batra, the director of Kapoor & Sons, had said: "For me the movie wasn’t just about that (homosexuality). It was one of the facets, but surely an important one."

Batra added: "The fact is the moment you say you are making a gay film half the audience doesn’t show up. I was trying to give something palatable to them and yet trying to give them a view which will stay with them at least for a bit."

Batra’s and Kapoor’s responses capture a reality about gay films that Bollywood has belatedly begun recognising. That for commercial Bollywood to have a pathway for mainstream actors to play gay, the fact of their characters’ homosexuality should be kept under wraps as far as possible, and when finally unveiled, it should cater to a certain sanitised notion of homosexuality.

I am not begrudging this fact. If introducing homosexuality as a surprise element in the script will get more audiences to theatres, it can only do the cause a world of good. I am also happy that gay men are finally being portrayed not as stereotypes but humans with fully rounded personalities.

The art house circuit has been making gay films for a long time, but it was not until Dostana, and to a certain extent, Onir’s My Brother Nikhil, that gayness became a talking point in commercial cinema, and ergo, in drawing rooms.

Dostana was the first commercial film in which the protagonists were cool about being gay — even if only to get the girl — and this marked a departure in the characters’ hitherto wobbly acceptance of alternative sexuality.

The humour may have been deemed offensive to some, including this writer, but it cannot be denied that Dostana opened up a much-needed space for conversation on the issue. If that beginning has finally yielded Kapoor & Sons, it’s no one’s place to complain.

For sure, there will be demands from the community for better, greater representation. For viewers like me, the fact of a straight man playing gay is a step forward only because he is presented in a way that does not mock homosexuality. When it was first revealed that Fawad would play gay in Kapoor & Sons, I had written a blistering piece attacking the film’s supposed premise that we would have another gorgeous straight man play gay and have little to do in the film.

I was wrong, but my anxiety stemmed from reasons that remain legible even after Kapoor & Sons. What I and others of my ilk will need to learn is to give our filmmakers the benefit of the doubt. That said, the problems of representation of alternative lifestyles will continue to be a theme worth debating, for it is not an end point that can be reached in one go, but a journey that will see many hits and misses.

When Ang Lee made Brokeback Mountain ten years ago, the film was heralded as a classic love story with a bitter end. My own response to the film was intensely personal, one of those few times in life that art truly speaks to the soul. Yet, I have outgrown the film in the years since, not because it has failed to meet my expectations, but for the opposite reason: in its bare-knuckled pain, it remains an open wound.

Meanwhile, Hollywood has moved on, both on the drawing board and in casting. In The Kids Are All Right, the source of the dramatic conflict was a man trying to ruin a stable lesbian household, a quiet, bold departure from standard film conventions.

This week, Mark Ruffalo responded to criticism that he had hired the cisgender Matt Bomer to star as a trans woman in an upcoming film.

In India too, the journey of gay cinema has evolved from caricature to passion, perhaps thwarted passion and grief, but noble and welcome for all that. Kapoor & Sons was miles ahead of Dostana, and in its large-hearted message of acceptance, a welcome film. Yet, between these two poles, the search for ordinariness will continue.

Now there is space for a classic love story that also ends happily. Ranbir Kapoor has played the angst-ridden lover one too many times. Maybe he can look out for a role where his character finds the man of his dreams simply, without affectation, his homosexuality a living, breathing thing that consumes him, sure, but which also, ultimately, redeems him.

Also read: Open letter to Karan Johar on the subject of homosexuality in his films

Also read: Homosexuality is normal, kudos to Kapoor & Sons for showing this