three films on love

teenage romances are filled with a strange tension between the blatantly sexual and the prudishly virginal. ‘maine pyar kiya’ today on tv was a revelation for the amount of festering eroticism that exists in between bhagyashree and salman khan. the covert looks that she gives at the hair on his chest that can be seen just below his neck, the highly eroticized shin injury that is fetishized by salman khans imagination, the void of the central atrium in that plaster of paris house across which looks are exchanged in between bedrooms.. his body extremely ‘male’ and hers extremely ‘female’ wrapped in baby clothes and baby talk- frills and puffs- ‘friends’ caps- ‘i love you so much it hurts’ on a heart shaped card- the paraphernalia of post adolescence reeking with the odour of their bodies through which proxy connections are made in place of the impure physical .. she caresses his jacket, he fondles a shoe.. leaving so much more to our over active imagination..



so much more erotic than ‘tango’ this argentinean film where dance seems like a metaphor for the sexual games between men and women.. imagine the possibilities- the tango has always seemed to me to be a dance form where the players literally make love in public.. extremely posed in appearance the dance assigns clear roles to the male as the strong leader around which female skirts swirl. of course the roles are often reversed and the boundaries do get blurred- which makes the erotic content of the dance form extremely heavy- after all what is eroticism if not slightly twisted. the movie on the other hand was just plain boring with its po-mo attempts at self reflexivity and overly stylized cinematography.

and eroticism is almost non-existent in a yash chopra film- its as if sex has been effectively air brushed away into oblivion. there is and always i think should be a certain element of the ‘base’ in descriptions of love in between two people. ‘mohaabbatein’ except for a few scenes in between the young men and their lovers instead preferred to smoothen all edges and prettify the abstract idea of love into an ideal with almost no relation to the real felt emotion.