View: Coming out of the cinema, coming out of the closet

In matters of sexuality and gender, Hindi cinema is a microcosm of Indian cinema across languages..

However, as a tsunami of cis-het machismo has raged across the country in the 2020s - epitomised by the pan-India triumph of the KGF franchise (Kannada), the Pushpa series (Telugu) and Animal (Hindi) - one megastar has stunned cinephiles this winter with Kaathal: The Core (Malayalam), a tender film on a closeted gay man...

Mirroring Indian society's awkwardness with homosexuality, the characters in Kaathal step so gingerly around the subject, that the word 'gay' is not uttered till well into the running time..

Jyothika and Mammootty - she a stalwart of Tamil cinema, he a Malayalam cinema legend - are both lovely in Kaathal, although the 27-year age gap between them is a reminder that women actors of Mammootty's age (he's 72) continue to be ignored even by otherwise progressive cinema...

Mammootty's decision to act as a gay man in a thinking film - and produce it - at this stage in his career is significant because he has built his mass fan base by doing machoistic cinema for decades, playing larger-than-life men who conform to dominant notions of masculinity..

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