While Hollywood Goes Colour Blind In Uni-Race Romance, Shah Rukh Khan Still Sells Fairness Creams

In a year of appalling gawd-awful sequels and  repeatedly renewed franchise films when Priyanka Chopra made her Hollywood debut with what is arguably the worst film of her film career—and yes Baywatch Returns  was worse than her Bollywood debut Andaaz—Hollywood came up with a cold turkey…no, make that a frozen turkey …called The  Mountain Between  Us.

Just how much  of a hash could be made of a  romantic drama featuring two such  charismatic actors like Idris Elba and Kate Winsley,  is a question that this  film answers  with telling force. There were two things that kept me watching till the very end of this survival drama where the question whether the lead pair would live through the aircrash  or not was overtaken by  a larger concern whether I, the  viewer, would survive the ordeal of watching this survival disaster.

 I did. That’s the good news. I kept watching till the corny end when Elba and Winslet rushed towards  each other from two corners of  London’s crowded  street to collide in a clinch that Titanic would have welcomed. I was there, glued, because I wanted to know when the handsome could finally make love.

There, I said it. Elba and Winslet are on paper,such a sexy pair you just want them to hit the sack immediately after the plane crash. But the narrative hellbent  on torture, procrastinates  the inevitable copulation. And when it does happen the love-making sequence , in an abandoned snow-drenched cabin with a canine watching them, is joke,  a horny misadventure.

Fumbling and grasping at all the wrong places, moaning and cooing in encouragement Winslet seems to be practicing for a Titanic sequel that would never happen(so why bother?!). as for Elba, there are enough jokes about  the ‘mountain’ that he brings with him wherever he  goes. I wish he had worked on not turning it into  a molehill.Elba’s excuse is that he had not done a love-making scene before, so he left the nitty-gritty of the act to his costar who  in her time has done plenty of the torrid with  costars as  old as 14(The Reader).

Love-making scenes in the movies are more often than not, hilarious. And very awkward to perform. Actor  Ray Romano has spoken about how awkward love scenes can get because—and I quote—“I know  it’s fake, but he(pointing to his pelvic region) doesn’t.”

Amen.

The  other interesting aspect in an otherwise drab and dull drama that is The Mountain Between Us is the ‘colour blindness’ of the lead pair.In case you didn’t notice Idris is Black, Winslet is White. Not once during their tedious togetherness is this fact mentioned. For  all we know , Idris Elba could be White.

This is an inverted kind of racism where in the garb  of liberalism the cultural specificity  of  the actor is magically erased from the script.

“You are Black.But I love you  just the same,” is  the theme song underlining this race-erased  romance.

Chalo, at least Hollywood is making an effort to free cinema of colour prejudice. In India, Shah Rukh Khan is still selling fairness creams to a country obsessed with  the gora rang.