Netflix caters for a wide range of tastes with its movies – whether you want to laugh, cry or be challenged – and now it has an especially controversial offering. The streaming platform has made available to watch in the UK a 2010 Indian film considered so extreme and explicit that it was initially blocked from release in its home country. Gandu is an erotic black-and-white abstract film directed by Qaushiq Mukherjee.
Among many eyebrow-raising sequences of sex , the most shocking was a scene that the filmmaker claimed saw two of his actors engage in real-life, unsimulated sex for the camera. Subsequently, it faced a huge amount of controversy during its initial release, with audience members even reportedly walking out. Gandu – which is translated for English-speaking audiences as meaning ‘asshole’ – follows a frustrated teenage rapper who steals from his mother’s lover and then ‘embarks on a drug-fuelled rampage with a rickshaw puller’.
Aside from the numerous graphic sex scenes between Gandu’s mother (Kamalika Banerjee) and her lover Dasbabu (Silajit Majumder), which the youngster often sneaks in on, the most shocking moment of the film features lead actor Anubrata Basu. Basu is shown with a fully erect penis in a sex scene with co-star Rii Sen, with the director – also known as Q – saying that the duo had real-life sex. At a Q&A at the 2011 Slamdance Festival, Q said that the actors were ‘good friends’ who had real sex and ‘really went at it,.
