This week, the column is going to live up to its name. I have watched Aamra, a new Bengali film that has been marketed as Tollywood’s first sex comedy. A sex comedy is, well, basically French. Or Italian. Sometimes Anglo-Saxon English or American. Like Irma La Douce. Where Shirley Maclaine prances about blithely in green lingerie with a matching green bow in her hair. Or Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow that had Sophia Loren imposing as ever in black lace lingerie. Or Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, that has Marilyn Monroe going about in whatever. Or Mae West doing anything.

The best sex comedy is as wicked, contrived, playful, delightful, titillating, and light-of-touch as lingerie, and that’s why both agree so much with the French, but a sex comedy in Bengali? Literature in Bengali has achieved world class often, but Bengali as the language of mass media has a problem.

It cannot spell out the facts of life. Say, when it comes to the depiction of the intimate physical relationship between two individuals (I am learning, I am learning), what does Bengali cinema, or Indian cinema in general, still do?

It employs a few time-tested strategies: Silence (suggesting intimate physical relationship between two individuals does not happen), song/dream sequence (involving dance that suggests intimate physical relationship between two individuals through dance, but songs seem to take place within parentheses and don’t affect the main narrative) and accident (that rainy night, when the boy and the girl did not know what they were doing).

Yet you know how the men and women, Mithunda included, pant with passion. Popular cinema, throbbing with intimate physical relationships between two individuals despite itself, looks as schizophrenic as Sridevi: the mind will not look at what the body is doing.

And when an “art-house” film like Rituparno Ghosh’s Antarmahal takes up exploring intimate physical relationship between two individuals, it is taken so seriously that it becomes pornographic.

In this context, I watched Aamra with an elderly relative. It may lack the brilliance and the sophisticated self-consciousness of a true sex comedy, but it scores a first in many ways.

Unlike the often tortuous plots of the classic sex comedy, Aamra has very little storyline. It shows a bunch of young upmarket Calcuttans, between late teens and late twenties, and it is about the threads of their lives getting entangled as each searches for life and love in desperate, confused, fumbling ways through online chat, dating, phone calls and some pressures of the real world.

You have seen them in TV serials? But in Aamra these young people are different, because the camera is deliberately jerky, but doesn’t flinch. The film shows the characters leading the lives that their parents know they do, but would have a problem acknowledging it in public.

Aamra works better because its young director Mainak Bhaumik is more interested in telling than showing. Its characters — a young wannabe Bangla band rockstar, a filmmaker, a college student having an affair with her English teacher, a hot babe of a school teacher who has broken up with the wannabe rockstar — speak in the lingua franca of the contemporary young, peppered with English and expletives, both phirang and Bengali.

Aamra gives this language straight, without nyakami, steamrolling such delicacies like the invisible inverted commas we use when we use Bengali expletives, which are somehow more crude than English expletives.

The language, helped by the documentary form of the film, becomes the main character. A friend advises the rockstar to get a girl, explaining dead-pan and in detail the biological reasons that are responsible for the sterile phase he is going through with his music, and it’s hilarious.

The rockstar remembers the time when he had stolen money from his father and had run off with his then girlfriend, the school teacher, to Kalimpong, got into an accident, was confined to a room, where they had “created some kind of a world record”. It’s very funny, but sad.

The school teacher can’t snap out of her relationship with the rockstar, mentally, but almost goes to bed with another man, discusses with her girlfriend his brand-value as a kisser and eventually decides to marry the man her mother chooses and surprises herself.

The 19-year-old cuddly college-goer is unapologetic about the fact that older men like her and she likes them right back, but she remains as cute as ever. I said I liked her. At this point, a fight broke out between my elderly relative and I.

The multiplex and the DVD revolution were to blame. Films don’t have to cater to the family audience any more. They can choose their audience and use real speech and show real lives.

My only complaint is that Aamra moves rather painfully towards neat “endings”, which weren’t necessary. But it calls a spade a spade. I didn’t though. In case you haven’t noticed, I have only spoken of “intimate physical relationship between two individuals”. I am goody-goody.

chandrima@abpmail.com