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Netflix caters for a wide range of tastes with its movies – whether you want to laugh, cry or be challenged – and now it has an especially controversial offering.
The streaming platform has made available to watch in the UK a 2010 Indian film considered so extreme and explicit that it was initially blocked from release in its home country.
Gandu is an erotic black-and-white abstract film directed by Qaushiq Mukherjee.
Among many eyebrow-raising sequences of sex, the most shocking was a scene that the filmmaker claimed saw two of his actors engage in real-life, unsimulated sex for the camera.
Subsequently, it faced a huge amount of controversy during its initial release, with audience members even reportedly walking out.
Gandu – which is translated for English-speaking audiences as meaning ‘a*****e’ – follows a frustrated teenage rapper who steals from his mother’s lover and then ‘embarks on a drug-fuelled rampage with a rickshaw puller’.
A movie with real, unsimulated sex is now available to stream on Netflix (Picture: Netflix)
Aside from the numerous graphic sex scenes between Gandu’s mother (Kamalika Banerjee) and her lover Dasbabu (Silajit Majumder), which the youngster often sneaks in on, the most shocking moment of the film features lead actor Anubrata Basu.
Basu is shown with a fully erect penis in a sex scene with co-star Rii Sen, with the director – also known as Q – saying that the duo had real-life sex.
At a Q&A at the 2011 Slamdance Festival, Q said that the actors were ‘good friends’ who had real sex and ‘really went at it, in the spirit of their favourite extreme films, such as The Idiots’, according to Hammer to Nail’s review from the event.
The climactic extended sex scene also sees Sen play the role of a kitten, lapping at a bowl of milk.
Gandu follows a nihilistic rapper and features drugs, bad language and graphic sex scenes (Picture: Netflix)
Gandu also features explicit language, with use of the words ‘c***’, ‘f**k’ and ‘p***y’.
Due to its controversial content, as well as it being considered taboo in India, the movie didn’t receive its first screening in the country until almost two years after its initial release, at the Osian Film Festival in July 2012.
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It was reportedly then finally unofficially released online in 2017.
Despite the backlash, Gandu was actually positively reviewed by some critics, with Variety dubbing it a ‘high-energy example of a rarefied genre’ and a ‘happily transgressive rhyme-fuelled romp’.
It also has a 68% fresh score on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes from its audience score with one viewer’s four-star rating reading: ‘Imaginative, entertaining, shocking – probably not coming to a screen near you sadly.’
‘This is more a revolution than a film,’ added another.
The film initially struggled to be shown in India, due to its …read more
Source:: Metro
