My Story Mainak Bhaumik

I made a movie about three girlfriends. Aami Aar Amaar Girlfriends is a chick flick about girl world. Something that girls would love to come and watch with their gang of girlfriends, as it’s all about how they love to dress up, have girlie fun, their hangouts, their close sisterhood bonding and uninhibited gal-pal conversations.

Little did I know we have a very conservative moral police that could have a problem with a scene showing girls changing in front of each other, using slang and what not, as real girls do. I guess if men drink or change in front of each other or use slang it’s fine. Women it seems have a social responsibility to maintain a Victorian sense of decorum.

It’s all about a moral code enforced upon us. And additionally, the reality of our moral policing centre is that it may take five days to see a film and then 10 days or more to review it, knowing fully well that Bengali movies are released every other week. It would be nice if a more suitable system was enforced.

We are apparently being accused of putting up posters with the release date on it. If that was a problem then how is it that we have received a certification for the trailer of the same movie which clearly carries the release date of the film?

It saddens me to witness this combination of seeming negligence and convenient conservatism when it comes to women, which results in unnecessary hiccups in the distribution process. I also don’t understand why a jury can’t come to a decision when it’s a piece of fiction.

A woman who is school counsellor, chooses to have a mutually consensual affair with her student. Her choice may be an immoral or even an illegal one, as is clearly discussed in the film as well. But having said that, who are we to be a moral police about it? Why is it okay when, in another movie, a married man was shown falling in love with his teenage daughter’s friend, but the same standards don’t apply today in my movie, six years later, when it comes to a woman?

If somebody murders people and gets away with it, does that mean we can’t make a film about it? Why is it okay to make movies about men being serial killers, rapists, terrorists who mass murder innocent people, but not okay to make a movie showing a woman having an affair outside her marriage with a younger guy?

In my film’s trailer of the three girls having uninhibited fun on the beach, the message I was giving female audiences was — “Finally, here is a movie about real women like you and your girlfriends, about how real girls have fun on their own, when there are no boys around”. Which is why the tagline: “It’s a girl’s world. Sorry boys”.

But with the recent turn of events, it seems the message the moral police would like to give out is: “It’s a boy’s world. Sorry girls”.

What is your message for Mainak? Tell ttmetro@abpmail.com