I want to put a plug for the film *Evening Shadows,* a coming-out film of a young middle-class man to his oppressively conservative parents directed by Sridhar Rangayan who has made several LGBTQ themed Hindi films. Rangayan’s *Pink Mirror* did not really work for me; the plot was a bit too melodramatic for my taste. But *Evening Shadows* is a good watch. Both are available on Netflix.
*Evening Shadows* tells the story of Karthik, a young photographer living in gay-friendly Bombay and played with an impressive and disarming mix of vulnerability and confidence by the young actor Devansh Doshi, who goes home to visit his parents in a conservative small town in Karnataka for a puja, which morphs into a match-making standoff between the son and the father. Karthik is in a longterm loving relationship with his lover and partner Aman back in Bombay. Anant Mahadevan–the last time I saw him was in Sai Paranjape’s *Adose Padose* in the mid 80s — plays Karthik’s father Damodar with the kind of patriarchal cluelessness, entitlement and lack of imagination to push everyone around as he pleases in his family, particularly his wife, Karthik’s mother.
Indeed it is this awareness–that homophobia is another eruption of an extremely vilified form of patriarchal misogyny–that is the backbone of this film. In glittering saris and jewels, and with all the auspicious markings of a good Hindu wife, a deerkha sumangali, Karthik’s mother is played with a larger-than-life screen presence by Mona Ambegaonkar, who won the Best Supporting Actress at the Out At the Movies awards in 2018. The award is entirely justified. Vasudha, Karthik’s mother, in many ways, fits the long-suffering silently loving mother we are used to seeing in Hindi melodramas. But Ambegaonkar plays that mother in a finely nuanced performance that shows us a middle-aged woman awakening to her own abject status within her family by gradually identifying with her son’s oppression. It is a very good performance.
Gay characters out of the closet used to be either campy entertainment or tragic victims in Hindi films. But *Evening Shadows* shows two cosmopolitan young men comfortable in their relationship and sexuality and putting the responsibility for homophobia firmly back to where it belongs: it is not they who need to hide anything; it is the society that needs to change. This is our new generation. They are here and they are queer. Deal with it, nation.
Set against the backdrop of the social and cultural debates in the last couple of years in India regarding Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalized homosexual acts, *Evening Shadows* shows that one casualty of such homophobic laws is the clandestine and exploitative lifestyle of men like Karthik’s uncle, a married gay middle aged man with children who at one point tries to sexually assault Karthik. The film has an ambitious scope and it manages to connect all the dots well. Doshi and Ambegaonkar both deliver memorable performances with their characters bursting the bubble of patriarchal privilege with natural power. I highly recommend this film for a campus screening and discussion at some point for a transnational representation of gay rights in reel life and real life.
The Red Earth 