Velvetdisappointment

suggestions galore that Khambatta uses Balraj for his sexual pleasure, but nothing that confirms this fact. All we get to see is stuff like Johar giving Balraj the moniker “Johnny” after ogling long and hard at his crotch.

It could have grown from there to be a sustainable, if edgy, romance between the two male protagonists. Instead, what we get is an all-surface love story between Balraj and Rosie Noronha, a jazz singer played by the talented Anushka Sharma, who, however, never really comes into her own as this character. Her story starts with grim moodiness and suddenly somersaults to heightened passion and then, as with all women who happen to find themselves in gangster flicks, returns to a dull dénouement.

Johar does play Khambatta well, given the limited scope of the character. An oily wheelerdealer, he knows whom to tap to get his work done, as the Bombay of yore is spliced to yield the metropolis of today. He moves among the high and mighty, knows their weaknesses fully well and exploits his connections to get the best deal. The movie looks very good and, as for the underground homosexual, perhaps captures a truth of the times in the character of Khambatta. But it breaks no new ground. It is merely another film in which the homosexual, if not a rotten weakling, is a consummate player who games the system. To that extent, Kashyap might be lauded for writing a wily player, not a wuss.

But there the expectations must stop. The Khambatta story will, of course, end suitably — but we will not know, of course, what happens to his wife, a glamorous model whose plasticity is the perfect foil to the sham marriage she is in. We, of course, will not know about any of Khambatta’s other lovers, men who make no appearance in the film. We know only the fate of his one true love, Johnny Balraj, whom he finishes as Balraj finishes him, and we will laugh our way out of the cinema halls about the lunacy of it all. Bombay Velvet is a deeply gay film. If only its director, whom we extol as one of our best, had let it live and breathe as one.