Dunno Y…Na Jaane Kyun - BOLD in scenes, but SHY in conviction!!

Though our Indian film industry is putting up a brave front and churning out films on controversial subjects, sadly enough they lack the courage to project them as stark as possible. Stark, yes! They do make it, only as far as scenes are concerned. But when it comes to depicting the reasons for the same, they shy out and want to project the characters as not “one by choice” but rather a “victim of circumstances”. And if the writer and the director lack the conviction how can the audiences accept such a serious subject with so much of glitches. Naturally the film has to fall flat and the reasons are too many problems in the same household.

The film reminds me of the opening scene from the film “Atithi, Tum Kab Jaoge” which had the lead Ajay Devgun narrating a film script to Satish Kaushik that has the hero on crutches, a mother who is dumb, a sister who is deaf and a father who is paralysed or some what. The same reasoning was perhaps applied for turning the lead character a gay, which includes the entire malfunctional D'Souza family, their friends and lovers.

Dunno Y, the director didn’t want to show that it was neither a lack of choice nor want of voice that the character turns gay. Rather, it was his inner instincts that compel him to sleep with men and not because of bad parenting or a broken family. Dunno Y… director Sanjay Sharma made the story more melodramatic than the tear jerkers of our daily soaps by strenuously dramatizing the trauma in the family.

While Dunno Y… has made a brave attempt to show the family's efforts to come to terms with the dark secrets of the character, it could have been the “Brokeback Mountain” of Hindi Cinema had the director made an attempt to break the conventional mould and dared to portray a gay relationship without a disoriented family theme. Perhaps Sanjay Sharma was a bit intimidated to speak on the subject openly lest it gets slotted into the meaningful cinema slot. 

Not only the film has a mother who sleeps around with her boss, but even her elder married son with a child, makes out with a man for a want of a voice. Hang on, this strange family has something more to offer. Not only the gay protagonist has a torrid affair with his partner, but the neglected wife has an in house toy boy who gets into a shower together to continue the passion for those not interested in M2M scenes.

While the explicit gay love-making sequences are being talked about, one might find it nothing exceptional as a decade and half back - Rahul Bose and Kushal Punjabi had a stark love making scene in a library in the short film “BomGay” by Riyad Vinci Wadia. That too at a time when no one dared speak about homosexuality candidly. If Kushal could do a frontal nudity and an actor par excellence like Rahul Bose (who was already established then) could enact a passive gay (sans clothes), wonder what big deal it is being made about the passionate scenes in this movie. It seems, the idea of showing the love making scenes was more to bring in the audiences for the cheesy steamy scenes than driving the point home to accept a relationship (even if its gay).

A fatally flawed film, the talented cast comprises of Zeenat Aman, who as an abandoned wife and single mother plays her part convincingly well. The credit also goes to Kapil Sharma and Yuvraaj Parasher for performing the bed scenes with élan, but nothing much can be written about in terms of their acting prowess. In short, worth a one time dekho.