What explains the applause and critical acclaim that the film CRD received, in India and abroad? As this article analyses, not only is its form and dalliance with issues of art and politics pretentious, it is blatantly misogynistic.
The film Shuddh Desi Romance departs from other Bollywood films in its attempt to reconfigure gender relations, its anti-marriage stance and its advocacy of relationships of love outside the realm of conventions and customs. It not only espouses values that go against normative constructs of Indianness but also questions cinematic conventions. The film is important in the way it splices the individual confusions of the romantic couple with the confusions that prevail in the country's social fabric which is punctured by hierarchies and orthodoxies of caste and patriarchy.
As the global traffic of ideas, images and objects filter into the Marathi sensorium, the new Marathi film constitutes the surface that registers, absorbs and refl ects its effects. Emerging alongside the mainstream, these fi lms tap into middle-class anxiety about changing lifestyles, urban unrest, an excess of choice, disparities and rural distress. Through this they attempt a different, almost edgy engagement with the everyday in order to manufacture an archive of the contemporary.
