Filmmaker Q's sex comedy 'Brahman Naman' battles 'sanskar' and caste

For Q this might be his tamest yet The indie filmmaker who has in the past given audiences the sexually explicit Gandu 2010 and the rather macabre Ludo 2015 is gearing up for the release of his latest film Brahman Naman a highschool sex comedy on July 7 Three inebriated virginal Anglophile quizzers all Brahmins sometime in the Bengaluru of the 1980s go through the demands of puberty only to find themselves constantly tussling with a repressive Indian sanskari attitude and strangely casteLR Tanmay Dhanania Chaitanya Varad and Shashank Arora star in Brahman Naman as three ace quizzers quizzed out when it comes to sexWe keep talking about things we cannot eat but when it comes to cinema our belief is that it has to be completely palatable Q says predictably after admonishing us for referring to him as Qaushiq Mukherjee I killed Qaushiq eight years ago he says jaded with having to explain this a little too oftenQIn the business of making and breaking identities Qrsquos latest picks up on the middleclass attitude to sex something which has probably undergone very little change over the decades When it comes to sex comedies it seems we have not understood the key issue of repression The impact of sexual identity on social development is hardly thought about we are told learning how to fk is wrong It is a physical ability as basic as eating sleeping and drinking good sex is as important as good water or good food he saysLike Porkyrsquos and American Pie or like the novel The Inscrutable Americans the mission for Naman Shashank Arora who starred in Titli last year Ajay Tanmay Dhanania and Ramu Chaitanya Varad is more or less distinguished in the course of the movie mdash hormones are raging there is a subconscious effort to get laid but it seems easier to win a quiz than lose onersquos virginity However there is nothing stopping these highschool braniacs from lsquodoing itrsquo not even the charming competition on the menrsquos playing field such as Ronnie Sid Mallya The only obstacles to a memorable or forgettable romp are themselves as Q says There are opportunities aplenty right from hotel rooms during a quiz competition in Kolkata to a night at Namanrsquos fatherrsquos mattress manufacturing factory Rubber On but none that the boys want to seize The mission hardly gets to missionaryIf anything Brahman Naman is an antisex comedy Several puns gags and jokes in Brahman Naman fall flat in that way that nerdy adolescent humour can outside of its circles but it can be argued that this is the world that scriptwriter Naman Ramachandran wanted to lead us into Naman had been working on the script for more than two years and it looked into the politics of caste and how men in India are brought up says Q The semiautobiographical script borrows from Ramachandranrsquos upbringing the severity of classrooms and living with caste discrimination Even among the trio Naman is higher up the rung perhaps because he is fairer than Ajay says QAs caste becomes the path to abstinence Q is sure that there will be those who shall be offended by the theme of the film if not its content itrsquos a sex comedy what do you expect or title Dismissing these concerns as impairment on the part of audiences who need medical assistance for their lack of humour Q says he is a big fan of extreme physical cinema such as that put forth by Japanese filmmakers since the 1970s Lots of goofing around and slapstick apart Q says Look at the way these characters carry themselves there is a certain manner in which virgin boys walkQ breaks the mold in a number of ways with this film which is his most commercial yet It will see a global release on Netflix bypassing the usual travails of cinema in the country It is also set in Bengaluru a city often ignored by mainstream cinema Most of my films were set in Kolkata so it was refreshing to depart from this and feature Bengaluru However much of this film is shot in Mysuru we found Bengaluru of the 1980s there since not much has changed We all lived together for almost a month with the actors imbibing the slow way of life of the 80s imbibing working on their diction the South Indian accent to their English says QWhen will we have a highschool sex comedy which talks about the female experience Where girls want to lose their virginity to nerdy quizzers and the charming RonnieMallyas of the world I am waiting for a story like that A story where women talk how they were brought up in a space like India with all its gender and racial intricacies I want more dirty stories from and by women the kind that will make men rethink feminine sensuality