Between love and love: Miss Man

Shoma A. Chatterji

Miss Man, as the title suggests, is about a young man who feels he is a woman trapped in a man’s body. “Derived from people I have known and incidents that impacted me, Miss Man is deeply personal. Coming out of the closet with one’s actual sexual preference has been a long struggle for many of my friends and relatives. For them, life, love and struggle to belong to the mainstream, to be accepted and recognised for what they are and not for what they are expected to be formed my inspiration to make this film,” says Tathagata Ghosh, director of this short film.

“I am not gay myself but I have been witness to their struggle with their identity. I have seen the pain they suffer just because of the way they are.” says Ghosh, who began his filmmaking and writing career after a diploma in writing for film and television from Vancouver Film School, Canada. After working in films and television for more than a decade, he finally made Miss Man, an independent short fiction film.

The 25-minute film has a fluid narrative that content-wise moves back and forth from Manab’s childhood to his present youth and form-wise vacillates fluently through abstractions, real slices of life in the young man and through surreal images captured from Manab’s point of view. The result is both powerful and aesthetically refined, which makes for a good film.

In the short flashbacks, we see how the little boy loves to wear a saree, deck up in flowers and wear kajal and lipstick. His dance on a song by Tagore, in which he’s dressed up as a girl, fetches him the first prize. His father is very happy. Even when he is dressed up in shorts and a shirt as a small boy, his eyes, lined with kajal, he looks at the camera sadly. There is a scene showing his thrilled father carrying him after he bags a prize. But the same father turns his back on him when he accidentally learns of his son’s identity crises. He reacts violently when he discovers that his only son is a gay person who aspires to be a girl.

The best takeaway from the film is the performance by Arghya Adhikary, the young man who plays Manab. Arghya is a gay in real life and not an actor. Ghosh was able to persuade him to do this role and he has literally lived it because he has gone through similar pains and tragedy in his real life. Manab happens to meet a sex worker at a bus station. Later, he takes refuge in her room. This leads to a strange bonding between two marginalised “outsiders” who, it seems, begin to live together though the girl openly suggests this is a kind of compromise.

The cinematography, music, editing and sound design backs brilliant performance by the main actors.

Miss Man has been included in the syllabus of Women and Gender Studies (non-western Queer culture) in Louisiana State University.

Among the many awards the film has won include the prestigious Golden Elephant Award for the Best Short Film at the 7th Siliguri Short and Documentary Film Festival, Best Director (LGBTQ) Award at the Indian Film Festival of Cincinnati in Ohio, Best Short Film (International Competition) at the Pondicherry International Film Festival, and so on. The bottomline for Ghosh is — “Love does not happen between a man and a woman. But between love and love.”