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The Long Zoom of Public Obscenities

A story of bringing a partner home to Kolkata is steeped in naturalism.

While Choton — a high-strung grad student researching for a project on Indian “queer and trans vernaculars” — flashes between English and Bangla, snacking and translating and catching up with his aunt (Gargi Mukherjee), Raheem is having a slower, quieter, more piecemeal conversation with his boyfriend’s uncle (Debashis Roy Chowdhury). With its layered story of bilingual identity, its concern with the infinitely varied truths of gender and sexuality that colonial law has tried to subjugate and regulate, and with the structures of class, culture, family, and desire that can be both comforting and oppressive, inborn and bizarre, leading to secrets, shames, covert expressions, unrealized lives — in its depiction of all of this, Public Obscenities could have become bombastic, ponderously self-important. He’s got the quiet attention and the quick politeness of a respectful guest (“Good boy!” says Choton’s aunt Pishimoni, pinching his cheek), but he’s also got the wider curiosity and deeper intensity of an artist and the playful, teasing affection of a sweet boyfriend.

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