He decides to showcase her story as a play, hoping that it’ll sway her family and her village towards a more progressive way of thinking. What is he going to do? Was he going to get mad and out her out of resentment? But Sahil takes it in his stride and after listening to Sweety talk about her life of isolation and sadness, he becomes a fast friend and ally. Now, at this point of the film, anxiety started to spike. After a couple of heterosexual mishaps, he finally clicks on. Sahil seems to instantly fall in love with her and thinks she feels the same and so follows her to her small village of Moga. Sahil is then literally dragged into Sweety’s life when Baloo, her brother, follows her after having chased her through Dehli. The next time we see Sweety is when she gatecrashes a god-awful play written by Sahil, a struggling playwright trying to reach out of his bigshot director father’s shadow. It begins with a wedding at which Sweety and Kuhu meet during a run-of-the-mill opening Bollywood number that lasts about 15 minutes. The plot of the film is a bit convoluted, in all honesty, as the case with all Bollywood films (it’s what makes them good!). At first, homosexuality isn’t a possibility, but when Sweety’s brother outs her, her family seems to reject in a harrowing scene that ends with her crying on the floor surrounded by her friends and Kuhu, but finally her father accepts her in the climax of the film which portrays Sweety through the stages of her life in a glass box crying for her father’s help. However, through Sweety’s journey, her family seems to go through all three of these. Just like with any culture or religion, there are families that will accept their children with open arms and unconditional support and there will be families that won’t, and there are some families in which you won’t know where you stand because it’s not even considered a possibility. It’s at this moment I would like to emphasise that not all Indian families are like this. It’s almost insulting and definitely ridiculous how homosexuality is just not even considered a possibility. The worst-case scenario that her family could think of is that she could marry a Muslim man, they don’t even consider that she could be a lesbian. Sweety’s self-imposed isolation, her hesitancy when Kuhu seems to flirt with her, the hoops she has to jump through just to go on a date with her lady love…it all feels very familiar. It feels personal, not because I’m the top of my class in university (god, I don’t even know most people in my class), but because education seems to, once again, be second to settling down and having a family. So, the opening scene hits uncomfortably close to home when a well-meaning uncle has a conversation with Sweety and her father Balbir in which Balbir gushes about his daughter being the top student of her class in university, but then is asked by the uncle if he is now going to find her a husband. But it showed me from a very young age what my family expected of me. Of course, I always dismissed it since 7-year-old Amandeep wouldn’t touch boys with a 50-foot pole because…ew. It was my mother’s comeback to all the misdemeanours 7-year-old Amandeep decided to get into – “you’re going to need to stop this if you ever want a husband” and all that. Growing up, I was taught to believe in the inevitability that one day, I was going to be married to a man and be a housewife. This film hits a very personal note for me. As a bisexual woman from an Indian family, the film hits harder than any of the plethora of LGBT+ films that focused on predominantly white, middle class gay men. Directed by Shelly Chopra Dhar, it has been described by critics as an “earnest, unapologetic depiction of the act of coming out in a conservative society” (Saibal Chatterjee) and its effect on the Indian population of the LGBT+ community has been profound. However, it also manages to comment on a range of topics such as the pressure of patriarchal families, both on men and women, and the disdain for the “western influence” in India. Despite the rather morose description, this film is, at heart, a romantic comedy with a wholesome and overall happy ending. Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (How I Felt When I Saw That Girl) tells the story of the emotionally isolated Sweety Chaudhary who struggles to reconcile her sexuality with the pressures of her traditionally heteronormative society.
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