It’s Not Arjun Reddy and Kabir Singh It’s Shankar We Should Worry About
Jaggananth Puri is laughing all the way to the bank. His obnoxious deeply offensive gender-prejudiced and brain-challenged new film Telugu Ismart Shankar is raking in the dough as though there’s no tomorrow.
The film hits rockbottom of the creative barrel churning out the kind of venomous toxic garbage which one thought Indian cinema was done with. But then there is always those Puri ki Puri sexist misogynistic type of filmmakers who stop at nothing to provide the proverbial frontbenchers the cheap thrills that they are looking for outside their homes.
It comes as shock to know that this misogynist mess has a woman(actress Charmee Kaur) as co-producer. Ms Kaur obviously saw no offence in women being pushed around by a hero who has a chip not only his shoulder , but also in his head.
Indeed Ismart Shankar is the commercial Telugu cinema’s equivalent of pornography.Women are treated as playthings to be enjoyed and abused as and when the lord and master , a.k.a Hero Sahib wishes.And men in the audience love it when the hero shouts at the heroine as though she is his slave.
There are numerous sequences in this film where the heroine is manhandled and heckled. Apparently that’s a very manly thing to do in Jagannath Puri’s kingdom of cinematic thrills. But the one sequence that had meshellshocked is the one where our hero Shankar(Ram Potheneni) barges in on a woman and threatens to rape her ,calls the cops on him for sexual harassment.
But by the time the cops arrive she has changed her kind. She is in love with her harasser.Rape is thereby reduced to an easily negotiable condition.
So there we have it the full-blown satire on the MeToo movement. Puri knows the real truth about women who shout out for sexual offences.If he had his way Puri would let women be heckled, accosted, harassed and manhandled because that’s what they like. Or so Jagannath Puri believes.
And going by the boxoffice collections of Ismart Shankar the moviegoing audiences believes in Puri’s thesis on gender dynamics. Empowering women in our cinema is a far cry when movies don’t even seem to respect them.While we’ve been
I tried getting in touch with Puri . He chose not to respond. The success of his crass film must have left him speechless .