Netflix has added one of its most contentious movies yet.
It’s a 2010 Indian movie that was so explicit that it wasn’t allowed to be released in its own country at first.
Gandu, an erotic black-and-white abstract film by Qaushiq Mukherjee, may now be streamed in the UK.
Credit: Florian G Seefried / Getty
According to Metro, the title, which means “a*****e” in English, depicts a teenage rapper who is angry and steals from his mother’s lover before going on a dr*g-fueled rampage with a rickshaw puller.
There are a lot of explicit s** scenes in the movie, including ones between Gandu’s mother (Kamalika Banerjee) and her lover Dasbabu (Silajit Majumder), which the main character (Anubrata Basu) often sees.
The most talked-about scene in Gandu, though, is the climactic one where the main actor, Basu, had a fully erect p***s during a s** scene with co-star Rii Sen.. The filmmaker says the performers had actual, unsimulated s** for the camera.
Hammer to Nail reported that Mukherjee, who is also known as Q, revealed during a Q&A session at the 2011 Slamdance Festival that the actors were “good friends” who had s** and “really went at it, in the spirit of their favorite extreme films, such as The Idiots.”
The long scene also shows Sen pretending to be a cat and drinking from a bowl of milk. The movie also has graphic language, with words like “c***,” “f***,” and “p****,” which added to the controversy surrounding its release.
Because it was controversial in India, Gandu didn’t get its first showing there until almost two years later, at the Osian Film Festival in July 2012. It is said that it was released online without permission in 2017.
Even though there were walkouts and negative reactions during its first showings, some critics liked the movie. Variety called it a “high-energy example of a rarefied genre” and a “happily transgressive rhyme-fueled romp.”
Currently, the movie has a 68% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. One viewer said, “Imaginative, entertaining, shocking—probably not coming to a screen near you sadly,” while another said, “more a revolution than a film.”
Some IMDb users called Gandu “an ode to Andy Warhol” and said, “The film has some erotic scenes that are explicit but not p***ographic in any way.”
However, not everyone was impressed. One reviewer said, “S** is superimposed every time you start to snooze off on the non-s** scenes…p***!” Nothing else, maybe less! On a scale of 1 to 10.
If you want something that will make you think and cause trouble, you can now watch Gandu on Netflix.