Book Review: Rated A- Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India
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Ali Raz reviews Rated A- Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India by Darshana Sreedhar Mini (University of California Press, 2024).
Dirty Picture (Milan Luthria, 2011) promised to tell a story. Here was Bollywood, with all its considerable resources and global clout, angling to render lifelike the larger-than-life persona of actress Silk Smitha: towering star and sex symbol of a booming ‘80s and ‘90s South Indian film industry. Smitha had once been a persona commanding enough to single-handedly assure the success of any film she starred in. Starring heavy hitters Vidya Balan and Emraan Hashmi, Dirty Picture, too, was a box office hit—but also, depending on who one asks, either a critical success or a complete travesty. For the former camp, Dirty Picture stands as “a seminal work that will be studied in feminist discourses” (to quote a breathless review in The Times of India.) For others, it is no more than “a marketing gimmick camouflaged as a film” (per cultural critic Farzana Versey.) A whole cycle of films followed in the wake of Dirty Picture, clamoring to fill in its gaps. Some were reparative in intent, some simply salacious. All demonstrated the intense fascination that followed Silk Smitha even into the grave. What is it about Smitha that makes her the magnetic center of such intensities?
