PIL targets The Kerala Story 2, seeks removal of ‘Kerala’ from title amid communal concerns

A new Public Interest Litigation (PIL) has been filed before the Kerala High Court challenging the title and release of the recently released film The Kerala Story 2. The petition, submitted on March 3 by a retired social science teacher and a practicing lawyer, calls for the removal of the word “Kerala” from the film’s title, arguing that it unfairly associates the State with sensitive and controversial themes. According to the plea, the petitioners contend that the film’s title and subject matter risk portraying Kerala in a negative light. They have alleged that the narrative reportedly depicts the State as a centre for forced religious conversions, a portrayal they believe could damage its social and cultural image. The petition also references an ongoing legal tussle involving the filmmakers. It notes that the producers have approached a Division Bench of the High Court challenging a recent interim order issued by a Single Bench, which had temporarily stayed the film’s release. T...

Last Tango in Paris at 50: Bertolucci’s controversial drama remains troubling

The Italian director’s knotty drama remains a provocation, a film filled with lyrical beauty but also repulsive cruelty

Revisiting films on the occasion of major anniversaries can be a disorienting reminder of time’s too-swift passage: that film is now 20/30/40 years old? How can that be? Why does it still feel so much younger than I do? In other cases, however, the film wears its advanced age in a way that makes complete sense, and so it is with Last Tango in Paris, released in cinemas in 1973. Now a half-century old, Bernardo Bertolucci’s lightning rod for scandal and debate has dated in many of the ways you might expect, but that’s not quite what I mean: at 50, the film’s age has now caught up with the overriding air of middle-aged despair and disarray that it always carried. In a sense, it was a film made to be forgotten, and then remembered with bittersweet, conflicted feelings, its significant beauty curdled over time.

Bring up Last Tango in Paris in cinephile circles today – especially those reckoning with the gender politics of the artform post-MeToo – and you won’t hear that many fond endorsements. When it’s brought up at all, the conversation swiftly narrows to its most notorious scene: the one where Marlon Brando’s Paul, a recently widowed American abroad, holed up in a desolately furnished Parisian apartment, forces himself on Maria Schneider’s Jeanne, a 20-year-old ingenue whose name he refuses to learn. Grabbing a dab of fridge-cold butter for lubrication, he anally rapes her.

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