Dangerous trailer review: When Ram Gopal Varma unveiled the posters for his next "lesbian crime/action film" Dangerous earlier this week, it was a clear foreboding of what the film had in store for its audiences. Raunchy closeups of the female leads, exaggerated nudity, suggestive portraits - all the picturisation hyperbolic as if to only to make a point. The question is, what point? Of queer inclusivity? Of women-centrism? Or of liberated cinema?
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Whichever point Varma was aiming at seems to have been missed by a long margin in the Dangerous trailer.
It opens with a line the filmmaker already iterated while releasing the posters, one after the other: "Gentle reminder to all moralists, section 377 has been repealed by the honourable Supreme Court of India." This reminder, though "gentle," was harshly counteractive to the content it was affixed to.
"Fetishisation," "offensive," "misrepresentation" - these were just some of the ways in which the queer community is describing this project Varma seems to be deeming emancipatory, uplifting and favourable to India's LGBT community. Read some reactions here.
Dangerous Trailer Review: Looking At Same Sex Love Story Of Two Women Through The Male Gaze
The trailer, beyond that first disclaimer, is a medley of tongue action, violent blood, gore, eve-teasing and near-nude exhibitions of the female body. And also the "FIRST ROMANTIC DUET SONG ever in the HISTORY of WORLD CINEMA picturised on 2 WOMEN," as Varma describes it.
There are no dialogues. Perhaps Dangerous is some sort of avant-garde high-conception filmmaking Varma, known for such with his magnum opuses like Satya and Siva, is attempting?
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Even so, it's tricky to uphold such picturisations, no matter what kind of new ground they try to break since they are doing so at the real-time expenses of a marginalised community. Is it not outrageous that lesbianism has to carry the brunt of male-gazed narratives that present them as little more than flesh objects? Must queer projects be headlined by non-queer folk? Is that kind of representation any kind of representation at all? In the way Dangerous seems to have been made, will it serve as anything more than male fantasy?
With Dangerous, one knew, even at the outset, that there was a foundational flaw in perspective. "DANGEROUS is about 2 women who because of bad experiences with men, passionately fall in love with each other," Varma's synopsis of his film read. What message does this project? That homosexuality is neither a choice nor genetic for women, but a concept relative to relationships with men, putting that gender, once again, at the centre of the world.
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