Joshua Nair
A film that has been banned in a number of countries for including graphic and unsimulated sex scenes is now on Netflix.
The Indian-made film was originally released in 2010, and was blocked from release in its home country at the time.
It's almost as if 2010 was the year of controversial films, with A Serbian Film also being released that year, which still stirs up conversation to this day.
But now, 14 years on, both of these titles still remain relevant, while being fairly well received by critics.
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The former was directed by Qaushiq Mukherjee, known as 'Q', who had the vision of creating a black-and-white abstract film with elements of sex weaved into the storyline.
But this isn't some fake Hollywood stunt, where the actor is pretending to do the deed while there's a camera in front of them, with the other actor being filmed from the other point of view later on, and it all being edited together to look like real sex.
No, Q wanted his movie to be 100 percent authentic, and so he claimed that two of the actors engaged in real unsimulated sex for the movie on several occasions as part of the plot.
Due to this, it faced a lot of backlash following its release, as it was reported that audience members walked out.
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The film is called Gandu, which translates to 'a******e', and the story follows a frustrated teenage rapper who steals from his mother's lover to fund his love for drugs, all while trying to make it in the music industry.
There are numerous graphic sex scenes between Gandu’s mother (Kamalika Banerjee) and her lover Dasbabu (Silajit Majumder), which main character Gandu (Anubrata Basu) walks in on.
In the most controversial scene of the film, Basu has a fully erect penis in a sex scene with co-star Rii Sen, with Q saying that the pair had real-life sex.
At the 2011 Slamdance Festival, the director said they were 'good friends', adding: "(They) really went at it, in the spirit of their favourite extreme films, such as The Idiots," according to Hammer to Nail's review of the event.
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The scene also sees Sen role play a kitten, lapping at a bowl of milk.
On top of these obscenities, a number of swear words are used throughout the film, such as ‘c***’, ‘f**k’ and ‘p***y’, to name a few.
The film, rated 18 in the UK, was considered taboo in its native, so it didn't get its first screening in India until July 2021 at the Osian Film Festival.
Critics have generally received the film positively though, as Gandu boasts a decent score of 68 percent on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.
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Gandu is available to stream on Netflix now.