Kiss ka kissa: There were five or six retakes
The onscreen kiss between actors Ayushmann Khurrana and Jitendra Kumar was given a clean chit by the censor board, which granted Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan U/A certification for release. Writer-director Hitesh Kewalya, who hopes to start a positive dialogue with the recently released film about homosexuality, says the actors went all out for it with “butterflies” in their stomach.
Ask him if it took a lot of convincing to get the two actors to kiss in a scene, Kewalya says, “Not at all. I think when they heard the script, they knew where it is coming from. They also knew the importance of normalising this thing. If we don’t get conscious about a heterosexual couple kissing because we’ve seen it around, then I’m sure in times to come, we will be [comfortable with homosexual couples kissing, too].”
How many retakes happened? “We did some takes. There were some guffaws, but it was more like initial butterflies... I don’t remember exactly, but yeah, there were five to six takes,” he says.
Whether it was penning Shubh Mangal Saavdhan (2017) which delved into erectile dysfunction, or attempting to give a fillip to the discourse on homosexuality, the mainstay of Kewalya’s creativity as a writer lies in “exploring relationships”. It’s another thing that “sexuality becomes the entry point” because of the kind of movies he has done.
It’s an interesting dichotomy, wherein subjects that are hardly spoken about in Indian families are being enjoyed so widely by the audience, which pretty much celebrates movie-going as a family outing. “That is exactly the idea,” says the writerdirector, and adds, “We don’t discuss these things because somewhere we’ve put sexuality into a box that we should not talk about... openly, at least.”
Which is why these films help give the audience a marker to talk about. “The idea is to break these taboos. I think it’s a good thing if people are taking back some scenes, lines, and characters home, and talking about them. They might not be talking about sexuality directly, but somehow getting to know each other, even within a family, is important.”
And doing it with a cast of popular actors, including Neena Gupta and Gajraj Rao, was imperative “because this story needs such responsible people to carry it to the hearts of the audience”.