Tag: bollywood

And other anons:

Girl you have to watch ek ladki if you can. It’s sooo good! Like to watch an entire movie revolving around a desi girl being gay and on top of that being so well done – all the feelings <3

OMG, have you seen Ek ladki ko dekha?! I’m so happy, this is such a big step forward and I’m freaking out. There wasn’t much wlw content and the story was told a little differently but its purpose was prolly to open people’s minds more and it rocked. I’m so happy rn. The scenes that the two had together were like super cute and both ladies are so stunning ?

I did watch it! And I loved it! 

I thought I’d be disappointed, the comments when it first came out seemed to indicate that they’d sidelined the romance, sidelined it in a way that…minimized it? And that seemed far too easy to do and I went in expecting that, but that’s not really at all what it was?

It sucks that pretty muc hevery comment about loving it has to come with a caveat, “I know there wasn’t much of the f/f”. I say it too, but we’re having to almost apologize for liking it and like, warning people. When really, I think it did exactly what it set out to do, and really well. It was a warm family movie with a major f/f plot!

Like I said, I’d come in expecting to be disappointed but gosh, seeing them talking about something actually canon LGBT, the main plot, and it not being us reading into the subtext, that just floored me. If you know what I like, it’s good intentions and execution, and I really felt that here. So many little things jumped out to me. 

The layers of meta, lol, us watching an audience watching a father and daughter played by a father and daughter. Anil and Sonam have been approached for a team-up so often but this is the one they chose to use their big first one for. The two secondary plots of the father liking to cook but it being frowned on as a woman’s job and the “forbidden” aspect of an inter-religious marriage, where the audience could draw the connections between these two things they’d already processed as being minor and not a big deal and same-sex marriages, how Rajkummar’s character immediately backed away from anything romantic once he knew what was going on, how they let the father be the loving character and the horrible brother wield most of the homophobia, how it wasn’t her apologizing to them but in the end came down to how trapped and sad a life she’d lived because of this, how acceptance came down to being a matter of familial love. 

Lol, the Regina anon. I LOVED those scenes? I immediately clipped them from a terrible bootleg and translated and shared them with a friend so we could scream over them. Kuhu looking at Sweety and so quickly picking up on the gay? 

Also, I liked how specifically desi this was, how for so many of us, being closeted means retreating to this quiet, well-behaved role, acknowledging what our choices mean and simply living with it. Coming out and losing family does not tend to be our way of handling things. I’ve seen criticism for how withdrawn or difficult to read Sweety was, but really, that is how it often is, isn’t it? I’d think you’d have to be a kind of subpar movie critic for not picking up what she’s feeling, if anything.

While I and everyone else would have loved a female version of the title song, I still loved that whole little romantic montage for them. And I SWOONED at the hand kiss. Hand kissES. 

Yeah, yeah, in comparison to other media this might not be much, but for the context, for this. It was…a lot. It’s so undeniable.There was no way to interpret this as something not between lovers.

Ultimately, I came away from it feeling really good and really moved. I thought it was effectively paced, balanced a whoooole of things really well, and it just had heart and warmth.