CHENNAI: An actor from the Tamil film industry had published her traumatic experience of shooting a rape scene on an online news portal, a few months ago. But as with most anonymous accounts, the story was shared a few times, evoked sympathy, some social media opinions, a few calls for change in the ethics of the film industry and then was pushed back into the deep abyss of the web to be forgotten. A portion of actor Rekha’s interview from a video channel has gone viral over the past week, bringing the conversation about informed consent during the shooting of an intimate scene to the limelight.
In the video grab, and in the interviews that have followed its virility, the actor maintains what she has always said — that she was not even informed of the infamous kiss in the film Punnagai Mannan (1986), forget consenting — except that it is only now given the backdrop of the #Me- Too movement that people are sitting up and taking her seriously. This may be an old story, even one from another era of cinema, but two things make it important enough to centre this dialogue around it. One, that the actor has been speaking about it since it happened (whether she smiles when she says it is hardly the point, that she was sixteen) and that it involves two stalwarts of the industry — K Balachander, who is often touted as a feminist filmmaker, and Kamal Haasan, an acclaimed actor-turned-politician.
Two, not much has changed since Punnagai Mannan to now, given that rape scenes continue to be coveted plot points, sex scenes are now being handed to the audience in abundance thanks to unmonitored content on OTT platforms (short-lived for sure), and that the anonymous account is lesser than a year-old. Arguments such as, “It’s part of the job”, “It’s what she’s signing up for”, and “It’s not real”, don’t fly anymore because it’s as real as it gets for the actor, and if it’s not obvious enough, acting is a job, the actor — a worker with rights. An intimate scene, violent or passionate, must shake or titillate respectively and feel ‘real’ because the actor and the crew are good at what they do, and what it mustn’t do is shock the actor or make her body vulnerable without informed consent.
Time and again, lines have been blurred and abuse has happened on film sets because directors decided to spring a surprise on the female actor to evoke raw emotion — the iconic sex scene in Last Tango in Paris is a case in point, where the female actor was violated for the sake of art. It is with this background that we ought to revisit actor Rekha’s experience, and those of many others who remain silent in their discomfort. It is time now in Indian film industries to discuss intimacy coordinators, or the lack thereof. Intimacy coordinators are the latest addition to a film crew, specially brought in when an intimate scene is to be shot. They exist to diffuse the power that an auteur has, the power that keeps a young actor from saying no in the face of a break.
The presence of an intimacy coordinator ensures that the very last details of an intimate scene are nailed down, spoken about clearly, that the participating actors are informed and have given consent, that the scenes are choreographed, rehearsed and performed as practised with no surprises to anyone in the crew and to the director’s satisfaction. The #MeToo movement and the surrounding debates around sexual harassment and safety in the entertainment industries have made intimacy coordinating an increasingly popular role. The TimesUp movement has created a shift in work culture, and intimacy coordination seems a logical good practice among other things.
Hell, we know we need a change in our film industry cultures, so before shutting down the need for intimacy coordinators with “But this is not Hollywood, we’ll take a long time to get there, and remember no accused person in the MeToo movement has lost anything,” let’s try if we can start the change here. In an unequal world, we may not all get the same things at the same time, but in a globalised world, we can all at least ask for the same things at once. We lose nothing when we say that an actor’s rights are human rights. Because it’s true.
ARCHANAA SEKER seker.archanaa@gmail.com