Subhash K Jha revisits Vinod Pande’s controversial film, Sins, as it clocks 20 years.
Vinod Pande’s Sins is certainly not a sinful pretext for gratuitous sex and nudity. Ripping a cruel page out of the newspapers, writer-director Vinod Pande has reconstructed a dramatic and often shocking tale of forbidden love between a Catholic priest and a junior disciple.
Pande (Ek Baar Phir, Yeh Nazdeekiyan, Ek Naya Rishta, and Sach) is never a stranger to the dark side of love and relationships. In Sins, too, he doesn’t stop at the bedroom door but manages to build an intimidating pyramid of desperate passion between Father Williams (Shiny Ahuja) and Rosemary (Seema Rahmani).
One recalls the old 1960 film The Priest’s Wife in which Italian director Carlo Ponti cast Sophia Loren as the seductress humorously hankering the priest Marcello Mastroianni. In Sins, Vinod Pande denudes the theme of all its inherent humour – what we see is a luminously lit, starkly shot film, suffused with the sounds of hearts and souls cracking and falling apart.
Pande is at his best when depicting the beast in the priest. The later portions, where Rosemary makes determined efforts to escape Williams’ obsessive attentions to be with her kind husband Graham (Nitesh Pande), are done with severe intensity and desperate anxiety. Sins isn’t an easily digestible “love” story. The volatile central relationship and the priest’s rapid moral degeneration are cannily codified by good performances.
The Jesuit theme isn’t up for exploitation here. Pande’s protagonist is undoubtedly a priest, and Williams’ conduct certainly unorthodox. But the theme of sexual exploitation is not done in a squeamish or apologetic way. The lovemaking sequences between Williams and Rosemary get progressively wild and desperate until the narrative reaches a point of irredeemable tragedy, with the priest’s love turning into perverse possessiveness.
Shiny Ahuja and Seema Rahmani are surprisingly fluent in exploring the dark side of lust and love. Though a trifle awkward in his demeanour, Ahuja’s expressions change from anxiety to brutality with remarkable fluency. Rahmani is restrained and effective in conveying both her character’s vulnerability and cunning.
What comes in the way of their performances are the speech patterns – the thickly laden “Keralite” accents often go awry and end up coming in the way of emotions.
What saves the day is the relatively quiet soundtrack punctuated by fits of Williams’ flinch-inducing fury.
The sequence at the girls’ hostel from where William calls Rosemary away on the pretext that her mother is ill is remarkable.
“I’m ill I’m suffering!” bellows William before tearing Rosemary’s clothes off. The explicit depiction of anxieties that underline the clandestine liaison is keenly contoured in the two protagonists’ body language, and the way the director silhouettes them in mid close-ups.
Sins is by no means an outstanding piece of work. But its essentially scandalous theme is underscored by moments of structural serenity and a quiet subtlety that avert the imminent danger of surfacing salaciousness. The seaside location – almost replicating Ramesh Sippy’s Sagar – secrete a great deal of unspoken turbulence. Vinod Pande has never been afraid of reaching into unlit areas of the man-woman relationship. In “Sins,” he goes all the way to show a priest’s descent into an unbecoming passion. At the same time, the narrative desists from portraying Rosemary as a pure victim.
In this throwback interview, Vinod Pande talks with Subhash K Jha about Sins:
You raised a hornet’s nest with this film?
My cinema is never free of controversy. The most annoying thing is that a section of the Christian community objected to Sins without seeing a single frame! If they watched the film, they would know it is a sensitive and touching tale. It is a bold film but neither cheesy nor sleazy.
Some of the stills and promos are provocative.
The original promos were soft. We revised that in keeping with the film which is bold, though not titillating.
Yashraj Films is marketing Sins; this is a departure from their routine cinema.
I knew I had to work within a restricted budget because the film is in English, starring newcomers Shiney Ahuja and Seema Rahmani. Both are brilliant actors. Seema is from Los Angeles and Shiney is from Delhi. I had given myself a budget of Rs 10 crores. I went to Yash Chopra to seek his advice and I narrated the story. Ten days later, he told me his son Aditya loved the script. That’s how they became the film’s worldwide controllers.
Why is the film in English?
I designed it in that language. The non-English speaking audience may misconstrue the bold scenes. Sins IS bold. You’ll see a lot more nudity on screen, and parts of the anatomy never seen before. But they are aesthetically beautiful scenes. In our films, even clothed characters are made to look suggestive and vulgar. I took the film to the Censor Appellate Tribunal where, strangely, the two members who gave a judgement in my film’s favour were women. The one who spoke against my film was a man.
When the censors were so liberal with Sins, why did you have to go to the Censor Appellate Tribunal?
There was a shot of a nude back when the heroine gets up from bed. I couldn’t remove it for technical reasons. If removed, the sequence would look jumpy. The moment comes at a crucial point in the narrative when we accentuate her loneliness and anxieties as a woman in a forbidden relationship.
Isn’t there a fear of outrage against the film’s theme?
I am responsible only to my producers. I hate to point this out, but haven’t people seen my earlier work? A boy-meets-girl story has never interested me. In my first film, Ek Baar Phir, three decades ago, the wife walked out on her husband without apology. My films are always about the pain and ecstasy of forbidden love. But I have never gone beyond my aesthetic boundaries.
Seen in the correct perspective, it is a very tragic and sensitive story. The priest’s conscientious downfall is the film’s crux, not blasphemy or titillation. My film talks about the eternal battle between Christ and Satan.
And yet, Sins might be clubbed with other sex films?
This is my main worry. The promos have been interpreted to mean Sins is a sex film. I was scared of this, but I had no choice. A channel took the tapes of my promos, selected the nude bits, and interspersed them with similar visuals from Murder, etc. I was very upset. If you see my full promotional footage, it’s provocative in theory but not sleazy. The so-called moralists are saying I’ve put a priest into a sex film because sex per se doesn’t work. What utter bunk!
How did Sins originate?
I started shooting the film in 2003. I first read about this incident in 1998. In a full-page report in a local newspaper, a judge sentenced a priest to death. Then, I came across several incidents of priests in taboo relationships. But that wasn’t the right time to make it.
Are you aware you’ve courted controversy?
Yes. But as a creative artiste, I know my aesthetic and moral responsibilities. Cinema has a far-reaching impact. I know the influence of the medium. Just like a newspaper correspondent maintains a balance and a neutrality in his report, I’ve made a film that isn’t meant to offend anyone.
