Team FC
a queer film headlined by Malayalam superstar, 72-year old Mammootty - Mathew, a local politician in a small town in Kerala — is married and over the course of the film is divorced by his wife who has had enough of his secret, other life with his male, childhood friend.
The steadfast link between the bullying and death of queer kids — a neat, linear, consummate, causal, connecting thread — is best exemplified in a show like Adhura, with its gay ghost.
Both Adhura and Kohrra have gay murderers — a boy, a man — the intent being a conscious revenge for bullying or an instinctive brush of anger from being heart-sick. Queerness exists only to be mutilated, to be hurt, to be killed.
In that sense, these shows join the thin genre that the film "Haddi" as well as the streaming series "Kaala" and "Guns and Gulaabs" formed this year — with trans murderers — of queer bloodletting.
The arms stretch out wide in an intersectional yawn that animates most of the documentary series Rainbow Rishta, featuring a respectful, respectable queerness — the kind that does not find the need to distinguish queerness from brilliance, or queerness from beauty.
With trans actor Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju playing the newest member of the wedding planning crew — express their politics as storytelling, thinking it is enough. Storytelling is political. Storytelling is not only political.
The spectrum exists between the extremes of queer righteousness and queer villainy and in one of the most morally tempestuous yet narratively unfussy shows, School Of Lies, queerness is allowed to muddy neat and narratively lazy categories of victim and perpetrator.