Bollywood film breaks sex and marriage taboo

It is a first of sorts for Bollywood: a film about wife swapping that involves no large-scale shimmering song and dance sequences. Mixed Doubles is, in short, a serious movie about a taboo subject from India's film capital that has for decades relied on making people laugh or cry rather than think.

Made on a budget of just £85,000 and shot over 25 days, the film is a tongue-in-cheek take on sex and marriage. "It is about what happens when the spark goes in marriage. About what happens when the bedroom is not what it used to be," said Rajat Kapoor, the film's director.

In tackling such a subject the film, which opened yesterday, is seen as spearheading a new genre of Indian movies that attempt to tackle issues more subtly than the current crop of blockbusters. "It is not your typical Bollywood movie where everything is completely romanticised and hypocritically suggests that we are not sexual beings. Either that or they try to titillate audiences."

Set in middle-class Bombay, the film has a bored husband trying out wife swapping to revive his marriage. His frank, comic attempts at finding the right set of partners and eventually recasting his marriage would seem mild fare for western audiences but are refreshing for those in India.

What has struck people who have seen the film is that it shows women with a libido. Konkona Sen Sharma, who plays the frustrated wife in the film, told interviewers she had taken the role in part because it showed "that women also want to have sex. Very few films address themselves to a woman's sexual appetite."

Academics say movies like Mixed Doubles, which make little concession to English and deal with urban mores, are an indication of how Indian society is dividing. "What you can see is two kinds of movies. One for the dusty folk who live in the villages and plains of the country, and the other for wealthy urbanites with more cosmopolitan interests," said Dipanker Gupta, professor of sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Unusually for Bollywood, actors were auditioned, a departure in an environment where studios dictate casts to directors and new starlets are more likely to be beauty contest winners than drama school graduates. "There are plenty of great actors - it is the films they lack," Kapoor said.

He said his inspiration came from 60s Hollywood film-makers such as Billy Wilder, and he hoped to replicate the artistic respectability achieved by films like Some Like it Hot. "I wanted something a little more erotic and sensuous than your typical Bollywood movie."