Arun Fulara | Sunday / 2020

the male touch

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arun Fulara (screenwriter and director) Sunday / 2020 [10 minutes]

 

Indian director Arun Fulara’s short film Sunday is remarkable work in its quiet, almost meaningless patter of dialogue. Kamble (Shrikant Yadav), a middle-aged married man escapes to the local barber, the handsome young Jaan (Prakash Joshi) on many a Sunday, sometimes as on the day the movie portrays, simply to get a shave and a marvelously sensuous face massage.

     Flirtatiously Jaan offers his seemingly heterosexual customers what they also secretly seek out in the restricted society in which they live: the touch of a male hand. Fulara makes clear that the gentle attentions of the young barber are more than what they might first appear, as they offer up sexual sensations that men such as Kamble deeply desire but can find no way to engage except in their public interactions of tonsorial attentions.

     When Jaan even suggests that Kamble might someday wish to shave his mustache, the married man returns home to imagine in the mirror how he might look without it, wondering if he might not really be more attractive, certainly something which his wife might not even imagine commenting on.

     This is an emotionally moving tale of forbidden sexual desires played out simply by Kamble’s weekly need to have the barber put his hands upon his face if only for a few minutes. Sex has been sublimated into the furtive touch.

 

Los Angeles, November 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).