Horny kya? Why Adoor is right, and wrong

Adoor Gopalakrishnan is a great filmmaker, which in effect means he has made some great films that in turn means he is a man of what is, often caustically, called the 'film festival circuit', which is where films are screened when the weather is nice and balmy, which often happens to winters in this part of the world.

All that is fine. It's just that I don't remember any of his films. Of course I have seen his films—and, yes, in plural sense of the noun—since I was forced to watch all those "good, cultured" films on Doordarshan's second channel before the satellite television era. Forced by my father, who, like many fathers—especially Bengali fathers—of poor sons and daughters who grew up in the 1980s thought Bachchan and Bollywood were best served by the epithet masala. You eat your masala muri, or jhaal muri (puffed rice, for the uninitiated), in a paper cone, empty it by tapping the wider end of the cone on your right palm a couple of times to ensure even the last muri and chanachur has freed itself from the fold of the other end, and, if you were like me, look to your right and then to your left and then open the cone and lick the paper for the best taste of the mustard-oily spice, make the paper into a neat ball and throw it away. Finally.

But those festival-circuit films, dear sir, are like nice, bound books that would be kept back in the bookshelf after reading, my father would have told you. Gopalakrishnan, and Mrinal Sen, and Saji Karun, and a hundred others made such films. Films I saw but never quite figured out what they "meant".

So when Gopalakrishnan says something like theatres at film festivals are filled to a large extent by people who understand zilch about cinema and come only for the "hot scenes", he is addressing people like me. Or, wait, perhaps not.

Let's do a five-question test:

Did I go to any film festival? Yes.

Did I watch any film? Yes—at Siri Fort auditorium in Delhi, for both.

Did I remember the film/s? Not exactly.

Did I go there to watch the "hot", uncensored scenes? Hell, no. And not because I did not want to watch them. But because making that whole effort, and sitting through a few other inane ones, was simply not worth it.

Did/would I go back in case those scenes come uncut? Slim chances.

Two ayes, three naes.

Now let's repeat the test with that shabbily-dressed, half-washed, jhaalmuri-loving man who goes out and eats chhole bhature outside the festival venue, burps thrice and returns to take his seat—all in the wild hope of catching some wild scenes; the man who perhaps prompted Gopalakrishnan to say, “While eligible persons are waiting outside the theatres, ineligible ones storm the halls, expecting some hot scenes"):

Yes, yes, no, yes, yes.

There, Mr Gopalakrishnan, the man you purportedly cannot tolerate warming that seat in the festival theatre goes and watches more films at your film festivals than most 'average' Indian, who cares two hoots about those events. Is he making some "eligible persons" wait outside the theatres? Perhaps he is. But take him, and many others like him, out, and you would possibly struggle to fill up the auditorium—I know, for the auditoriums at Siri Fort were far from full when I went to watch a film or three twenty or more years ago.

But that is perhaps what Gopalakrishnan wants. Exclusive theatres for an exclusive set of people watching made by and for them.

Sounds good. Just don't call it a film 'festival' in that case.