Kamal asked to apologise for ‘unplanned kiss’
Actress Rekha said she was 16 when a kissing scene was filmed without her consent
Tamil actress Rekha’s shocking revelation about the “unplanned kiss” by actor Kamal Haasan in filmmaker K Balachander’s 1986 film Punnagai Mannan has raised a storm on social media. Many social media users have said that the veteran superstar should apologise to the actress for the kiss that, she added, was filmed without her consent when she was just 16.
“I’ve said this a 100 times. They shot the scene without me knowing about it. People ask me the same question and I’m fed up of answering it,” Rekha told The News Minute, insisting Haasan and the late Tamil cinema doyen Balachander tricked her into doing the scene.
She added that kiss helped the film in totality to bring out certain needed emotions.
“The kiss didn’t look ugly or aggressive on screen. There was a need for it, but I was a very young girl and I didn’t know about it. He [Balachander] said, ‘Kamal, close your eyes! You remember what I told you, right?’ and Kamal said that he did. Then we had to jump when he said 1, 2, 3... we kissed and then jumped. It was only when I watched it in theatres that I realised it had such a huge impact,” she said.
Rekha was only 16 when she did the film after completing class 10. She also talked about being told that the Censor Board would not approve of the kiss.
“They continued after that shot also, we had a location shift. Suresh Krissna and Vasanth were the associate directors, and I told them I wasn’t informed about the kiss and that I wouldn’t have agreed to it. But they told me to think of it as a big king kissing a small child. They told me it wouldn’t be passed by the censor. I asked them what the censor was,” she said.
According to the portal, she also said that neither Balachander nor Kamal Haasan apologised to her after the scene.
“Why would they apologise? The film was a superhit,” said Rekha.