A storey of love

Indian cinema has come a long way from portraying sexuality through metaphors like flowers ‘kissing’ in a field or relegating women characters to the roles of virtuous wives or scheming vamps, yet films that explore women’s sexuality in a nuanced way — eschewing this binary — remain rare.

Aditi Banerjee’s internationally acclaimed mini-series, Love at Fifth Floor, released on the Open Theatre OTT platform earlier this month, seeks to challenge this narrative. “I feel like female desire is still depicted in a very over-the-top way. Either you’re in a mini skirt, having a drink and talking about sex, or you’re a homemaker in a domestic serial. I wanted to break that mould — why is desire only for a certain kind of woman?” Aditi asks.

The series follows the lives of three women: a young homemaker and mother, an unhappily married CEO and a polyamorous professor. Played by Rachna Gupta, Dilnaz Irani and Virginia Rodrigues, respectively, their journeys take unexpected turns as they are forced to confront their relationships, desires and ambitions.

The homemaker stumbles upon a video chat room, the professor faces societal pressure to marry and the CEO stumbles upon a risqué video on her husband’s laptop. “I want to give agency to my characters and in everyday situations. A homemaker has her own desires and her own needs. Someone who is polyamorous doesn’t need to ‘look’ polyamorous. She can be like this traditional-looking person who teaches at a college. So I wanted to break those images of women and their world of desire,” Aditi explains.

The story takes place in an unassuming apartment complex in Bengaluru, with the characters’ lives unravelling behind closed doors. Explaining her fascination with this setting, Aditi says, “Bengaluru was the first place I lived in an apartment complex. And when I moved here, I felt that behind each window, there were certain stories happening. How we see people outside of their apartments could be different from what they are inside the apartments.” Reflecting the city’s multilingual character, the series features a mix of Kannada, Hindi and English.

The series was partially crowdfunded and shot in a friend’s apartment with a 15-member crew, many of whom were Aditi’s former students. She hadn’t anticipated the attention the series would garner, with screenings at several international film festivals, including the Montreal International Film Festival 2020, the Toronto Film Channel 2020 and Lift-Off Global Network — Paris 2020.

“My mom was the first to see it. She had spent time in Paris in her younger years and suggested we submit it to festivals there. I hadn’t even thought of that. But the responses were encouraging. I suppose what I’ve learned is that if your work carries a universal truth about emotions, people will connect with it.”

Now released on OTT, Banerjee hopes Love at Fifth Floor will reach a wider audience. “What scares me most about putting my work out there is the fear it will go unnoticed. I hope people pause, connect with it, and feel something. I want to create a sense of familiarity – the sense that this is the world around us – but with elements of surprise. Familiarity, surprise, pause, empathy – these are the emotions I hope people feel for my characters and my story,” she says.

Written by: Mahima Nagaraju