Bhaji Packaging Essay

Dawn C.
Professor Comer
AH 110

The Promise of Bhaji

Bhaji on the Beach. One look at the blazing orange cover bearing a sultry-looking woman’s bosom every bit as large as the title, and the viewer, perhaps the young male viewer in particular, is engaged, enticed, maybe even aroused. On first glance, this film promises to be every bit as good as the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. After all, the woman on the cover is wearing what looks to be sexy silky lingerie, her long dark hair tossed alluringly to the side, her head held high and eyes narrowed as if looking at her suitor-to-be. She’s not simply some boring white chick either, but somebody more exotic, a hint of Asian blood in her. “This,” the hormonal young male believes on first glance, “will be a great tit flick”; he never guesses that what he will get instead is a film about patriarchy and male violence, racism, and strong women.

But back to beginnings. At this point, the viewer doesn’t know much, hasn’t really seen more than the woman and the title. He doesn’t know what Bhaji is (though he hopes it's the woman on the cover), what beach it will take place on, why bhaji will be on the beach in the first place, but he has seen enough to know that he will like the film. Below the woman, below the title printed in jaunty pastels that come as close to dancing as a font can get, the soon-to-be-consumer reads that Amy Taubin of The Village Voice calls this a “A SUPER-INTELLIGENT COMEDY—FOR RUDE GIRLS EVERYWHERE.” The viewer likes that this movie will have rude girls in it, and not just any rude girls, but girls so rude they deserve to be called “RUDE GIRLS” in all caps. Below the quote, in silhouette against a cloud-filled sunset (or is it a sunrise?) seven figures walk, jump, dance on the beach. What a great party! Sun, sand, Bhaji, and RUDE GIRLS. The viewer hopes that Bhaji will be the rudest of the girls.

This viewer doesn’t have to turn the box over in his hands, but he does, just to make sure this is a movie for him. The slim sides are identical: boxed picture of the exotic heavily-bosomed woman at the top, the words "Bhaji on the Beach", centered below, and a silhouetted dancing couple at the bottom, only more confirmation that this is a film for him. Though he doesn’t need to, has in fact already been persuaded, he turns to the back cover, sees that Dave Kehr of Newsweek has called Bhaji on the Beach “A guaranteed crowd pleaser,” also all in excitable exclamatory caps. In inset photographs he sees three things. First, two young women smiling out at him, the sort his younger sister in high school might hang out with—nice girls, not as sexy as Bhaji (but not everybody can be, right?) one wearing too much make-up and the other not enough. Second, a male stripper (“what is THAT about?” he asks) dancing in front of a woman who wears a spaghetti-strap top and hot pink miniskirt. Third, an older woman (definitely Indian as in India Indian, not Native American) in the embrace of what appear to be three dashingly handsome white naval men.

Reading the paragraph on the back, this viewer could become disillusioned: Bhaji isn’t the woman on the cover but, rather, like this film, “an Indian treat that can be spicy or sweet.” The film may even be a bit of a chick flick, dealing with “a group of Indian women, living in England” who spend a day at the beach. Verbs like “gossiped, giggled, argued and fought” make him nervous that this will be a chick flick, but he’s heartened that, while this film may deal with “sex,” “race,” “battered wives,” and “male strippers,” while it may be a “unique look at female friendship,” it will ultimately be a “witty comedy” film that will remind him that “girls of any age just want to have fun.” There will be a beach, there will be dancing, there will be Bhaji (or whatever the woman’s name on the cover is). Whatever apprehensions he might have about the film, raised only in the paragraph description on the back (and, really, who pays attention to that stuff anyway?) and the odd picture of the male stripper (“What IS that about anyway?) are overshadowed by the overwhelming promise of hot chicks and the beach that caught his attention.

Sold. This film has been packaged and sold to the hormonal young male viewer, looking for a good time and hot babes on the beach.
Instead, this is just a sampling of what he gets:

An opening shot of a black swastika spray painted against the white wall of an Indian grocery.
A woman and her young son living in a domestic violence shelter, away from her abusive husband.
The abusive husband tracking down his ex-wife to beat her as a way of proving she can’t just walk away form him.
A young black man and his Indian girlfriend, dealing with an unexpected pregnancy, with different family and cultural expectations of what should be done and whether they should even be together.
Indian women. Young, old, married, single, mothers, daughters, all on a bus, all on an outing to the beach at Blackpool on a day to escape “patriarchy.”
Young white men, also going to Blackpool, who moon the Indian women in the bus, who “want curry tonight” and come on to the young Indian women, who spit on the woman who rightly says, “Piss off, you sexist prick.”

There is no hot-woman-on-the-beach scene, not nearly as many laughs as he’d hoped for, and in the end, he’s not entirely sure what he’s just seen, though he knows it is not what the cover promised. He’s not sure whether he’s disappointed (after all, it was kind of interesting to hear about the lives of these women), but he does feel deceived.

Failed marketing? Maybe. Certainly schizophrenic marketing. Bhaji on the Beach largely sells itself with sex and promises of comedy, but the film is better than that. Deeper, richer, more complex than that. Why manipulate a viewer to expect one thing only to deliver another? Why mislead the hormonal young male viewer in this way? There is no easy answer, aside from the general point that foreign films marketed towards American audiences are notoriously deceptive in this way (see the packaging for Ang Lee’s Eat Drink, Man Woman as another case in point). Maybe Americans are so shallow as to more likely watch a film based on a sexy cover that downplays the race of its characters by disguising them in silhouette than to watch a film that honestly claims through text and image to explore the complexities of race and sex in the lives of Indian women living in England.

Bottom line? Sex sells. But with Bhaji on the Beach, sex does not deliver.