recipe for coming out
by Douglas Messerli
Abhishek Verma (screenplay, based on
a story by Verma and Jayesh Bhosale, and director) Maacher Jhol (The
Fish Curry) / 2017 [12 minutes]
Maacher Jhol (The Fish Curry) is an animated Indian film
of 2017 that takes the simple theme of “coming out,” and presents it almost as
a recipe of success.
The independent son (voiced by Amar Chaudhary) of this story has taken a
long while in telling his father, who is still attempting to hurry him into
marriage with any of women acquaintances, that he is gay. But the day has
finally come, and he has invited his father for dinner in order to share his
sexuality with him.
To make certain that his father (voiced
by Suraj Ghosh) is in the best mood possible for the unwanted news, he makes a
fish curry from scratch, employing his own spices. Indeed in the first of the
film we get the entire recipe for the curry as we watch him prepare it in a
cartoon abbreviation, often taking time out to imagine the fish as his fellow
lover, whom he joins in the sea in a kind of fishy duet, sung by Rajesh Pawar.
The father arrives and they pleasantly chat, his dad once more insisting
that he should join a dating site and going look the appropriate woman to
marry. His son reports that he has already someone he loves, his father
interrupting with a listing of the possible women of whom he knows in his son’s
life.
But finally, as the father chews
delightfully on the fish, made to perfection, that the love he has found is not
a female but a male, and admits that he is gay, apologizing as in so very many
such films for not having told him sooner, having found not proper way or time
previously to tell him.
We do not see the father’s reaction,
only that he has finished the curry and immediately proceeds to leave.
The father arrives home with several
stacked tins of leftovers, telling his wife (Rajesh Pawar) that the curry was
indeed excellent, and that she should warm it up and share the rest with him.
As she begins to do so, enjoying the
flavors of her first bites, we realize that the story is being repeated all
over again, the father taking the opportunity of the special feast to put his
wife in a good mood so that he can tell her that her son is gay and has found a
male lover.
If the way to a lover’s heart is through
his stomach, so too, does it appear, that a way to the parent’s closed heart
about sexual deviation is through the taste buds. Apparently, you can’t say
much when they’re being so pleasantly entertained by maacher jhol, the Bengali
rohu (carp) dish that Howard I used to enjoy at our favorite Washington, D. C.
Indian restaurant, Apana.
Los Angeles, April 2, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (April 2022)
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