As Helmet Releases Today, Looking At Bollywood Films That Touched On Taboo Topics

Helmet release: Aparshakti Khurana and Pranutan Bahl starrer Helmet releases on OTT today, September 3. Following in the footsteps of his elder brother Ayushmann Khurrana, Aparshakti is making his debut as a lead actor with film that offers a quirky take on a deeply stigmatised subject.

Directed by Satram Ramani and co-produced by actor Dino Morea, Helmet deals with the taboo around contraception in India, how difficult it is for men to buy condoms and how that impacts couples' sex lives in our society. In the film, Khurana plays a newly married man named Lucky who wants to earn some quick money by looting an e-commerce truck with the help of his friend. However, his plan fails when he ends up with a consignment of condom packets, instead of mobile phones. Undeterred, Lucky formulates a start-up named "Helmet" that delivers condoms to customers on demand.

In the past few years, Bollywood has seen a rise in films that touch upon topics that still make us uncomfortable. There was a time when such films were a rarity and almost never got a nod from audience, no matter how well made they were. However, with the new millennium, Bollywood's approach to such subjects gradually changed, later snowballing into a trend of using a quirky storyline and a stigmatised subject to be a film's ultimate selling point.

The year 2000 saw the release of Tabu's film Astitva, an unusual film which touched on the subject of female infidelity and its consequences. Directed by Mahesh Manjrekar, Astitva went on to win the National Award for Best Marathi Film, but it wasn't much popular with the audience of the pre-internet and social media boom era, despite being talked about. A year later, we saw the release of Salman Khan, Preity Zinta and Rani Mukerjee starrer Chori Chori Chupke Chupke that focussed on surrogacy, albeit in the most Bollywood way possible, replete with a love triangle and sequences lifted off from Hollywood films like Pretty Woman.

In 2005, Zinta went on to star alongside Saif Ali Khan in Salaam Namaste, perhaps one of the first hit films on the subject of  live-in relationships and pregnancy out of a wedlock. One of the reasons why this film was accepted by the audience could be that it was set in Australia, and thus its premise seemed palatable to the Indian viewers. This wasn't, however, Zinta and Khan's first attempt at a film normalising pre-marital sex. They had also starred together in the film Kya Kehna, which released in 2000. Despite its dated look and melodramatic approach to a highly-relevant subject, Kya Kehna was a hit.

While there have been many films on the subject of infidelity, it was often treated as a plot-point that was used to show a person in poor light. In 2006, filmmaker Karan Johar's multi-starrer film Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna tried to break this perception, by using the subject to tell story of two individuals who are unhappy with their life and marriage, and end up falling in love with each other.

Then, it was the release of Khurrana's debut film Vicky Donor in 2012, that set the ball rolling in last decade for a string of films which broached unconventional subjects. While his first film focused on sperm donation, the 2015 film Shubh Mangal Saavdhan showcased problems related to erectile dysfunction. In 2018, the actor starred alongside Neena Gupta and Gajraj Rao in Badhai Ho, where a middle-aged couple ends up getting pregnant and it ends up disrupting life for all members of their family.

Other actors too have tried their hand at this genre that seems to be Khurrana's forte. Akshay Kumar featured in the 2018 film Pad Man that revolved around a man's quest to help women have access to cheaper sanitary napkins. A year before that, he starred with Bhumi Pednekar in Toilet: Ek Prem Katha that spoke on sanitation and the struggle to access clean and safe space for defecation that many women face even today in rural India.

There have been several other commercial Bollywood films that tried their hands at subjects which need to be broached in everyday conversation. Films like Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan and Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga tried to bring same sex love to mainstream cinema. Tabu and Amitabh Bachchan gave us a film on the stigma around huge age gap between a couple with Cheeni Kumm, this topic was also touched upon in Dil Chahta Hai, where a young man falls in love with a much older woman.

Here's hoping that filmmakers continue to broach taboo subjects long after it ceases to be a trend that brings audience to the theatre out of curiosity.

Suggested Reading:

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