46 years of ‘Manmatha Leelai’

At its heart, a sex comedy or an adult comedy is a story with sexual content and sex-related humour. It could be a bedroom farce or feature themes such as sexual appetite, voyeurism, infidelity etc.

The genre comes into focus as Venkat Prabhu’s Tamil adult comedy, Manmatha Leelai (2022) releases on April 1, 2022. The director cites K. Bhagyaraj’s ‘Drumstick Comedy’ as an influence but is emphatic that his movie is not a remake of K. Balachander’s movie of the same name, made 46 years ago.

Balachander’s Manmatha Leelai (1976), which is known to have caused a stir with the censor board, critics, and audience alike, is about Madhu (played by Kamal Haasan) and Rekha (played by Aalam), a married couple in love with each other. Unknown to Rekha, Madhu is also a womaniser who is easily excited by the female form, even if it’s a human physiology diagram in a doctor’s office. Madhu satiates his desires by wooing the many women he meets, while also lying to them that he is not married.

There’s the transistor-toting Madhavi (played by Hema Chaudhary), who is married to an alcoholic, also her intellectual inferior. Madhu woos her with a song on compatibility, of it being a rare God-given blessing.

There’s the nubile Kannagi (played by Jayapradha) who asks the sympathetic Madhu to pose as her new lover to win back her ex-boyfriend (played by Radha Ravi in his debut role). While she initially spurns his advances, the deceit becomes real as the two embark on an affair.

Bhargavi (played by Y. Vijaya) is the sultry-voiced mystery woman that Madhu encounters when he dials a wrong number on the telephone. She keeps first her identity, then her life a secret from Madhu, and this whets more than just his curiosity.

Then there’s the mentally unstable songstress, Jamuna, who would go to great lengths for the approval and validation that she has been denied all her life. Madhu provides her with the appreciation she hankers for, even as she begins to regard herself as his wife.

Arundhati is Madhu’s ‘blast from the past’, a call girl who moves in next door. Madhu tries to advise her on morality, and she schools him about acting upon one’s desires.

Apart from Arundhati, Manju, who works as Madhu’s assistant, is probably the only woman who is aware of his marital status and holds the power in her relationship dynamics with Madhu, while not succumbing to his charms and wiles.

Madhu assuages his guilt by confessing his numerous affairs to Iyer, his employee, and a god-fearing man who becomes increasingly agitated for having to hold Madhu’s secrets. When Rekha finds mounting evidence about Madhu’s infidelity, she wavers between staying in the marriage and leaving him. When she discovers her father’s liaison with someone whom she considers a social inferior, her mother’s words spur Rekha to return to a remorseful Madhu who has had a personal transformation after meeting some of his old lovers in vastly changed circumstances where sexual desire doesn’t occupy centre stage.

Kamal Haasan portrays Madhu as an unabashed womaniser with a saviour complex and no qualms, who eventually develops a conscience, while Rekha is portrayed by Amaal as an intelligent woman who is devoted to her husband. A saving grace is that the women in the narrative exercise agency concerning their desires. The movie also does not caricature the wife to justify the husband’s philandering, and the wife is depicted sporting sleeveless blouses, a symbol of modernity, as much as the other women in the movie.

Seen from today’s lens, there are many problematic bits about the movie. There’s the portrayal of the wife as chaste in her love for Madhu and her need for sex mainly for procreation, even as it is implied that the other women have loose morals for acting on their desire. Madhu’s deception is normalised as virility, while he would be regarded in today’s vocabulary as a sexual predator who capitalises on the insecurities and anguishes of the women he woos, all the while lying about being a bachelor.

Rekha’s return to Madhu is portrayed as a ‘coming-of-age’ moment when she begins to see her father beyond his role as her parent, as a man with sexual desires. However, her valid feelings about infidelity, as a woman and a wife are missing, as Madhu’s straying and her father’s liaison are normalised with the implication that ‘men will be men’.

The male gaze is at the heart of the story - it’s a ‘nudge-nudge, wink-wink’ brand of comedy. But even as a film in the genre of sex comedy, it falters for having to take a moral high ground in its resolution of some of the threads in the movie. This is a pitfall that Indian sex comedies fall into, having to balance between narrating an amusing tale of sexual desire and upholding values that are at the heart of Indian society.

M.S. Viswanathan’s songs for Manmatha Leelai were all written by Kannadasan. The songs, rendered by Yesudas, S.P. Balasubrahmanyam, A.V. Ramanan, P. Susheela, L.R. Easwari and Vani Jayaram became hugely popular for the range of musical styles they covered with ‘Hello my dear wrong number’, an erotic song becoming the catcall of the era.

In the 46 years since Manmatha Leelai was released, much has changed in society regarding the equality of the sexes. The adult comedy genre today can bring in the female gaze, and find clever solutions to solve the challenge of how much morality to let into the script. One can only hope that Venkat Prabhu brings to Manmatha Leelai and the adult comedy genre, his unique brand of subversion that he brought to the time loop movie format in Maanaadu (2021).

(Views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of OTTplay)

(Written by Saritha Rao Rayachoti)