In two recent releases, "Kya Kool Hain Hum" and "Bachke Rehna Re Baba", all stops seem to have been pulled out to titillate the audiences with raunchy acts.
In "Kya Kool..." Tusshar Kapoor simulates the sex act with a cat while in the other film Paresh Rawal and Rekha appear to lose all sense of dignity and grace to do a Dada Kondke-styled raunchy comedy peppered with vulgar jokes.
While cheesy visuals and dialogues were earlier restricted to upcoming filmmakers, today several mainstream names are game for no-holds-barred bawdy films.
In director Govind Menon's "Bachke Rehna...", Rekha looks appreciatively at a man's private parts and comments on how "tandurust" (healthy) he looks. Sigourney Weaver doing the lascivious mama in the original "Heartbreakers" never looked so compromised.
Juhi Chawla recalls how she squirmed and sobbed when she had to enact a song with vulgar connotations in David Dhawan's "Andaz". In the same film when Anil Kapoor had to lisp double entendre dialogues, he did it without batting an eyelid. "But I frankly had no idea what it meant," Anil says in hindsight.
He can't claim the same now. In "No Entry", which brother Boney Kapoor has produced, Anil is part of quite a raunchy cast, all of whom are busy ogling, leering and making suggestive sounds of appreciation.
Boney Kapoor is also the producer of "Bachke Rehna Re Baba". His past flop productions have apparently taught him to butter his bread in the right manner.
Lara Dutta, who stars in "No Entry", was part of the sex comedy "Masti" (one of the first of the farcical films that has taken over our films).
Lara, stressing her innocence, says: "I didn't have a single vulgar action or word in 'Masti'. Nor have I done anything even remotely objectionable in 'No Entry'. My role is akin to Tabu's brassy Punjabi housewife's act in 'Biwi No.1'. Sometimes one ends up saying or doing vulgar things unknowingly."
Manisha Koirala, recounting her experience while shooting for a film called "Chuppa Rustom", says: "They shot an entire song with me from the strangest of angles, even changed the tune and lyrics after shooting. I ended up looking extremely vulgar on screen." Manisha says that a lot of times stars end up doing vulgar things without their knowledge. This seems an unlikely explanation for what Tusshar Kapoor was seen doing in "Kya Kool Hain Hum". "The film is a sign of changing times," he says.
Sister Ekta Kapoor, known to produce wholesome family soaps, says the sequel to "Kya Kool..." would be
even more raunchy and sexy. "Please stay out if you're churlish about sex comedies."With prominent mainstream producers like Boney Kapoor ("Bachke Rehna Re Baba", "No Entry") and Ekta Kapoor ("Kya Kool Hain Hum") going in for raunchy films, there's widespread panic among the followers of aesthetic filmmaking.
Shraddha Pagare, who recently launched her production company Celeste-Moi, is at her wit's end.
"I'm an outside player in Bollywood. And I'm confused at the kind of films that work. On one end there's 'Parineeta'. On the other end there's 'Kya Kool...'. They are worlds apart.
"I'm planning to launch three new films. One featuring Sanjay Suri to be directed by Vikram Bhatt, another with Sammir Dattani to be helmed by Anant Mahadevan, and a third hard-hitting woman-centric subject about a wife who's declared infertile until she becomes pregnant through a man other than her husband. This is the kind of actors, filmmakers and subjects I believe in."
Bollywood's resident movie magnate Yash Chopra has the last word.
"Going by some of the films that have worked at the box office lately, it seems we filmmakers have a lot to worry about."
