It's a bold film where the first sex scene ends with a woman turning into a giant rodent, and we begin to realise that Guru is a fantasist. There is a touch of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman in how Guru's obsessions and delusions blur fact and fiction. Wildly frustrated, Guru spends his days addicted to dating apps and acts out a series of violent sexual fantasies, though Behl never makes clear whether these are real events, or figments of Guru's imagination. There is no space for him to have a partner or a sex life without everyone in his cramped household knowing and commenting, so he wants to have an extension built. There is the much more popular Bollywood version of Indian cinema, which a lot more people know about, and there is also the parallel independent film world where a lot of interesting work has happened, not just now or in the past 5 or 10 years, but over decades.Īgra tells the story of a repressed call centre employee named Guru, who lives in a small house with his parents and married siblings. As Behl himself says: 'There are so many films made in India, and there is a split personality, almost like two different ideas of Indian cinema that are there. It is also the latest addition to a lineage of transgressive, alternative Indian cinema that barely gets talked about. Director Kanu Behl's Agra, which played last Thursday in the Director's Fortnight sidebar section, is a shocking and forthright look at sexually repressed men in India that is replete with nudity and explicit sex scenes.

– Cannes review: The Zone of Interest is 'a masterpiece'īut anyone who imagines that all Indian cinema is so innocent was in for a big surprise at this year's Cannes Film Festival. – The power of Cannes hit How to Have Sex

Indeed, Bollywood directors over the last century have had to find ways to depict sexiness in understated, suggestive ways that get past the disapproving glare of the controlling censors – like a big number featuring a demure actress in a white sari running through a fountain, for example. One of the things Indian cinema is known for all around the world, as well as song-and-dance numbers, is its chasteness, as a result of popular Bollywood productions, which historically didn't even allow for kissing on screen, let alone sex scenes.

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