BackCINEMA CURRENT: I love my job
Office flirting is usually portrayed as a fun thing but workplace winking is boringly sexist and one-sided
Premium(A still from the movie Secretary. )
Sudhir Mishra’s Inkaar pretends to be an exploration of sexual harassment at the workplace, but just because a filmmaker is trying to bullshit himself, it doesn’t mean you have to play along.
More bored-room drama than board-room expose, Inkaar is a love story about two seriously hot people with communication issues. It could have been so many other things – a film actually about sexual harassment, for example, or a drama about a couple for whom climbing up the corporate ladder is the same as crawling into bed. In 1991, journalist Dilip Thakore wrote the novel Succession Derby about a bunch of oversexed achievers who expend equal amounts of energy on rolling in the hay and competing for the top job at their company. Unfortunately, the glorious time-passer was never optioned as a movie, and has slid into the pile of Indian novels that haven’t yet caught the imagination of writers and filmmakers. A film adaptation might not have passed the Central Board of Film Certification’s vigilance in any case—one of the candidates is a BDSM advocate; at least two men are cheating on their wives.
There is mostly sadism but little pleasure in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant.
This weekly series, which appears on Fridays, looks at how the cinema of the past helps us make sense of the present.
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