When exactly did sexuality become a male domain, asks Pooja Bhatt

Pooja Bhatt is the perfect interviewee. She abounds with energy and can go on and on giving headline-worthy quotes while at it. DNA met Pooja at the Blenders Pride Fashion Week, Winter/Festive 2012, where she’d come to promote her upcoming film- that-needs-no introduction: Jism 2.

It’s madness with a lot of flashlights and cameras going pop, almost enough to make someone go blind. And there’s all the noise and interviews to be done. Doesn’t she find all this madness exhausting, we wonder and she says in her characteristically throaty voice, “This is not madness! I think the Bangalore media is civilized. I did a press meet in Mumbai at a small mall and there were two and a half thousand people there! This is one of the reasons I love Bangalore.”

Moving on from Bangalore, we focus on Jism 2 and all the unwanted attention it has been garnering from (to state the obvious), the male audience. So, what would she tell the female audience who are just as curious about the film? “You will love it. In fact, I think this movie is going to be loved by all the women and gay men out there,” she unabashedly says. “Jism 2 is unashamedly sensual, but that said I’ve made it with a seriously feminine gaze,” Pooja continues without stopping to take a breath, “when you have a porn star as your lead and then to use her to portray a role that is sensual, that’s quite a responsibility. This movie has pushed my aesthetic abilities and I assure you that the movie won’t make you, as a woman, cringe.” Now, as a woman director who’s made it, does she think that Bollywood has finally come to accept women as auteurs? “Not really,” comes Pooja’s pat reply. “It’s a case of taking one step forward and two steps back. The problem with the industry is that it is stuck with clichés and they reason that ‘this is what people like’ but what they don’t realise is that they will accept what you give them.”

Deliberating more on the topic of the industrywallahs assuming what is right or wrong for the movie going public, Pooja passionately continues, “In 2002, the audience accepted Jism and nine years later, they are ready for Jism 2. I really think it’s not people who are hypocritical, it the people who make decisions that are hypocritical. So, where on one end they are okay with having item songs in movies, they create problems about a movie that deals with sex. Sexuality is as much a woman’s domain as it’s a man’s. So, when exactly did sexuality become a male domain?”

Pooja pointedly questions and the accompanying silence is  deafening.