Rohin Raveendran | The Booth / 2019

frisking for love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rohin Raveendran (screenwriter and director) The Booth / 2019 [15 minutes]

 

If Nick Neon’s character Jimmy Park in Zero One feels he cannot breathe, one might imagine how impossible it is for an Indian woman working days as a security guard in the large Pune shopping center to express her love for her young lesbian partner. We can suspect that she may have a husband at home, but even were that not the case, she probably does live with a family, who, if they discovered the truth, would not only shun her but publicly shame her. Even without family, as filmmakers have told us, lesbian life is not easy in India. In large part due to the patriarchal structures of the society, the sense of male supremacy, and the general homophobia still present in India. Despite gains made by the far more visible male homosexuals, lesbians have remained on the peripheries of the society, and are rarely even imagined to exist.

      Yet in Rohin Raveendran’s 2019 film, The Booth (in Hindi), two lesbian lovers are featured, but are forced to enact their sexual encounters in the most unlikely of places, a closed, tent-like booth, where one of the two women in this film, Rekha (Amruta Subhash) is employed presumably to check all women arriving and leaving for either a weapons or stolen merchandise.     

    Since she daily brings her lover Sargam (Parna Pethe) the traditional lunch box, we can only presume that this relationship has been going on for some time. We know nothing other than that. We perceive only that the guard’s younger lover—the film description telling us she is a college student—spends her day walking around and lounging throughout the spacious mall impatiently waiting for the time when the two can again come together to demonstrate their love.

       On this particular day, Sargam gets in line far too early, hoping for at least a special caress, but terrified of discovery with so many customers waiting in line, Rekha treats her friend as simply another person to routinely pat down, with no tender touching whatsoever.

       The younger girl has lunch, wanders in and out of stores, and even performs a karaoke-like performance of a famous love song, hopeful that her voice might trail down the halls and escalators to her lover below. But apparently it does not reach into the dark recesses of the clearly claustrophobic space wherein Rekha is forced to remain.

       Only late in the day, near closing does the guard phone Sargam to join her, and for a few moments they make love, an event to which we are not party in full. The girl has returned her silver lunch box, and as she packs up to leave, Rekha puts in gently into her backpack. We know, no matter what she must face at home, it will be filled again the next morning with the emblem of her devotion.

       The extremes to which these two loving women must go each day is nearly unimaginable. They exist not even in the symbolic closets of their own homes, but literally in a small space where any expression of the love can never represent a night of passion, a day of pleasure, or even a few stolen hours of simply being together. Everything for these two is illicit, as if they themselves were the very worst of thieves from which the guard daily tries to protect the mall shop’s owners.

      And it is not just a family or neighbors who conspire to maintain this harsh punishment, but the society at large. They are forced to embody the homophobia of the world in which they exist.

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2022).