It is learnt that when Ram Gopal Varma showed the nine-minute trailer of his proposed new web series Guns & Thighs to Amitabh Bachchan, he was shocked. He advised Ramu to scrap the idea of this fiercely sanguine bloodbath taking us back to the time when Dawood Ibrahim and Chota Rajan ruled Mumbai. But RGV is going ahead with the series. The six-minute trailer is a revelation. For one, Varma desists from casting any known faces, so that the impact of the gruesome graphic and grisly goings-on is explosive, potent and immediate. A gun goes off and a little boy’s face is splattered with blood.
For the first time in a web series produced in India, Ramu has shown a fully naked woman in a bedroom with a cop. The woman says, “When all is done all men want from women is their vagina”. She uses the crude Hindi word for the female genitilia. Elsewhere, a cop tells a gangster, “It seems your father put only half of his penis (the word used in Hindi is far cruder) in your mother’s vagina. That’s why you are half-cocked.” The dialogues are written by Ramu in English and duly translated in Hindi. The aim here is to shock with graphic language and lurid visuals.
There is no censor board breathing down Ramu’s neck. But the CBFC chairperson Pahlaj Nihalani has taken note of the crudity. “Making a series on the web comes with inbuilt responsibilities. Just because you have unlimited freedom on the internet, it doesn’t follow that you can show and say what you like. The Indian moviegoer has his own inbuilt censorship.”
To some extent Nihalani is right. Audiences are likely to get turned off by the aggressively lurid tone of the presentation.
