Mae West: Oh, Calcutta!

Analyzing Aamra, which she calls "a first in Begali cinema," columnist Chandrima S. Bhattacharya meditates on MAE WEST and the SEX COMEDY genre. Is Tollywood up to the challenge? asks her essay "Let’s say it like we see it."
• • Enjoy a slice of spice from Calcutta.
• • Aamra might lack the brilliance and sophisticated self-consciousness of true sex comedy, but it is a first in Bengali cinema as it calls a spade a spade, feels columnist Chandrima S. Bhattacharya, writing from India.
• • She states: "I have watched Aamra, a new Bengali film that has been marketed as Tollywood’s first sex comedy. A sex comedy is, well, basically French. Or Italian. Sometimes Anglo-Saxon English or American. Like Irma La Douce. Where Shirley Maclaine prances about blithely in green lingerie with a matching green bow in her hair. Or Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow that had Sophia Loren imposing as ever in black lace lingerie. Or Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, that has Marilyn Monroe going about in whatever. Or Mae West doing anything.
• • The best sex comedy is as wicked, contrived, playful, delightful, titillating, and light-of-touch as lingerie, and that’s why both agree so much with the French, but a sex comedy in Bengali? Literature in Bengali has achieved world class often, but Bengali as the language of mass media has a problem.
• • It cannot spell out the facts of life. Say, when it comes to the depiction of the intimate physical relationship between two individuals (I am learning), what does Bengali cinema, or Indian cinema in general, still do? It employs a few time-tested strategies: Silence (suggesting intimate physical relationship between two individuals does not happen), song/ dream sequence (involving dance that suggests intimate physical relationship between two individuals through dance, but songs seem to take place within parentheses and don’t affect the main narrative) and accident (a rainy night, when the boy and the girl did not know what they were doing).
• • Yet you know how the men and women, Mithunda included, pant with passion. Popular cinema, throbbing with intimate physical relationships between two individuals despite itself, looks as schizophrenic as Sridevi: the mind will not look at what the body is doing. ... Unlike the often tortuous plots of the classic sex comedy, Aamra has very little storyline. ...
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• • Source: The Telegraph [Calcutta, India] - - www.telegraphindia.com/
• • Byline: Chandrima S. Bhattacharya
• • Published on: 8 January 2007
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
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