When erotica isn’t more than heaving chests

To those in the Hindi film industry who want to market their movies as “erotic”, I have one request: please make them erotic. It kind of sounds simple and self-evident, but on the basis of what I have seen coming out in this genre for the past many years, it just isn’t.

Case in point: Pooja Bhatt’s much-hyped Jism 2, which was, truth be told, as arousing as a three-hundred page government report on better cultivation methods for bajra.

Much of good erotica is about that which is left to the imagination. The physical part of this ambiguity gets totally thrown out of the window when you make a well-known “adult star” like Sunny Leone the focus of the audience’s prurient attention. Anyone with an access to the Net and knowledge of how to use that marvellous invention called Google has seen Sunny in her natural surroundings, growling and prowling around in high-definition, or pixelated and buffering, depending on how fast your streaming speed is.

Like Ajantha Mendis’s carrom ball, her twists and turns have been analysed and re-analysed to the point that she can be easily unravelled, just like Mendis’ variations are nowadays. Grossly overexposed as she already is, making her do the deer-caught-in-the-headlights demure filmi heroine routine, with just a strategic slash on the side or a sudden plunge down the front being the only concessions to the “erotic” content, is an absolute disaster, given that sitting through the length of the movie provides absolutely no pay-off for the audience, an experience not unlike watching a murder mystery where the name, the motive and the modus operandi of the murderer are known beforehand.

The main problem of course remains the plotting. Unlike porn, erotica is supposed to have a story. Jism 2, like many others that have come before it in the genre, has none. Instead what is sought to pass for erotica are tortured expressions of passion, as if the people in question need fibre in their diet than heavenly release. Man and woman look at each other, heave their chests for a few seconds, and then rush into outstretched arms. And then they do it again. And again. Now for variety, she rushes to him from behind and buries her face into his back. Oh look. He is massaging oil on her shoulders in slow circular motions. Wow. Is this a movie or an ad for a tropical spa?

Who cares? As long as I can watch Arif Zakaria, the dangerous “Head” of the “Agency”, say “Tumhe sab kuch karna hai. Sab kuch”, (You have to do everything…everything) to the Sunny Leone character, it’s all hawt.

Then finally of course is the celluloid legerdemain, of promising one thing and showing something else. A standard arrow in the quiver of the erotic Hindi director, the sleight of hand lies in moving the camera so cleverly between light and shadow that though the audience thinks it is looking at what they paid money to see, it is actually the male actor’s chest that is being projected on the screen. A triumph of lighting, careful juxtaposition of  human bodies, strategically placed bedsheets and mood music, it is still bait and switch, unless of course it was Randeep Hooda’s bare nipple you came to see.

Which makes you wonder. Why can’t we in India do good erotica? Is it because ultimately even our erotica has to be romantic as per formula, just like everything else? (A B-grade Hindi flick I once saw, marketed as an erotic thriller like Jism 2 but about two women in love, had the female protagonists running about trees singing songs.) Or is it that between censors who won’t allow unbridled skin show and bad writers who cannot layer in even one mildly-arousing element, the genre becomes so hamstrung that what comes out in the end is pure, unintended hilarity?

Arnab Ray is the author of The Mine and May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss.