Anuja runs away with him the two, it turns out, have had a romantic entanglement of their own, unbeknownst to Tanay prior to that point. The sex scenes between the men thrum with heat, and Babbar is convincing in the role of a man whose main attraction is the mystery that surrounds him, managing to make his character’s emotional inscrutability compelling.īut once Babbar disappears from the narrative around the film’s midpoint, Cobalt Blue collapses.
The two grow close and eventually consummate their shared affection in secret.
Babbar’s character, with his sculpted physique, embodies an orthodox ideal of masculinity, and Tanay’s pull to him is instant. Anuja, meanwhile, lets the hair beneath her armpits grow with abandon, while she proudly declares that she’s unaware of the difference between salt and sugar, even if custom might dictate that a woman like her grasp such fundamentals of domestic life.Īn unnamed paying guest (Prateik Babbar), presumably not much older than Tanay and Anuja, soon ruptures this family dynamic when he takes an unoccupied room in the family’s house. In one early sequence, their mother (played by Geetanjali Kulkarni) is puzzled when she finds a cream marketed for girls in Tanay’s bedroom. They are raised by a pair of strict Brahmin parents from the state of Maharashtra, but neither Tanay nor Anuja wants to conform to the rigid rules of the gender-normative culture to which they belong. His sweet-tempered, effete mien is unlike that of his hockey-playing sister Anuja (Anjali Sivaraman), who’s around the same age. It is 1996, and Tanay is a college-going aspiring writer who devours the music of Michael Jackson. The film-which is mostly in Hindi with occasional dialogue in English and Malayalam-opens in Fort Kochi, Kerala, the state on the southwestern tip of India. Kundalkar’s directorial choices are ultimately the film’s undoing: He leans so heavily on such elements as voiceovers and often mundane symbolic imagery, along with the handsome cinematography of Vincenzo Condorelli, that he loses sight of his story’s soul. Around the time of the film’s eventual appearance on Netflix this April, the newspaper Mid-Day reported that Kundalkar had been accused of sexual misconduct by a crew member after production had wrapped, resulting in the corporation stripping him of his director credit.Ĭobalt Blue director Sachin Kundalkar seems to lack the imagination to illuminate the interior lives of his queer characters. The film, adapted from Kundalkar’s own 2006 Marathi-language novel by the same name (translated into English in 2013 by Jerry Pinto), was originally slated for release by Netflix last December, only for the company to postpone it with little explanation. The shot is, regrettably, among the lighter touches in Cobalt Blue, a film that otherwise strains to convey the passion and anguish of its principal characters with clarity. That frame, in which the male protagonist, Tanay (Neelay Mehendale), drives past a wall crowded with advertisements for Mehta’s film, is a sly nod to the cinematic tradition that Kundalkar is working in: Like Fire, Cobalt Blue is a mainstream Indian film that dares to center queer lives.
#FILM SAMMY KOREA XXI MOVIE#
How appropriate, then, that the poster for Mehta’s landmark film flashes across the screen late in Sachin Kundalkar’s Cobalt Blue, a movie released by Netflix India in April that follows a brother and sister who are unknowingly romanced by the same man. It would take the Indian Supreme Court two more decades after Fire’s release to declare Section 377 unconstitutional. Its spotlight on queer, female desire was an artistic risk in an era when the country still criminalized gay and lesbian sex under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which had been in place since 1861. Fire details a romance that blossoms between two women who are held captive in oppressive marriages to men. When director Deepa Mehta’s film Fire first hit theaters across India in 1998, it awakened the ire of the country’s right-wing fundamentalists, triggering violent protests.
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