Purva Bedi’s role in the soon to be released film, When Kiran Met Karen has been garnering worldwide attention. She talked to OUTinPerth’s Megan Smith.
Purva Bedi left behind the safety and security of a successful position as a management consultant to pursue a career as an actress for theatre, television and film in the late 1990’s. It was a risk that paid off with roles in the films American Desi, Green Card Fever and various appearances in television shows including Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Alias and ER.
Some would say that Bedi has taken another chance in accepting the role of Rachna in director, Manan Katohara’s cross-cultural film, When Kiran Met Karen. Interracial lesbian relationships are not common in popular media, and neither are roles in which a woman from the traditionally conservative world of Bollywood explores her sexuality. However concerns on behalf of prominent Indian actresses that the role would prejudice their Bollywood careers if they took it on have not fazed Indian-American Bedi, who said the decision to play Rachna was a relatively quick and easy one, stating “I wanted to make this movie because it tells a story that in the Indian diaspora has rarely been shared. In India, lesbianism is not only a taboo subject, but previous films based on the subject have bombed at the box office. This is one reason actresses there are reluctant to play these parts and one more reason for me to take the scary plunge of doing something that might fail but might also increase the possibilities of the roles Bollywood actresses are willing to accept and stories filmmakers want to tell. Simply because a subject is taboo is no reason to stop creating art about it. In fact it is just the opposite.”
When Kiran Met Karen tells the story of two actresses, Rachna and Jackie, cast as a lesbian couple in a film also called When Kiran Met Karen. Rachna assumes the role of Kiran in the movie within a movie, and as she begins to research her character, finds herself increasingly attracted to the co-star Jackie/Karen who is Chinese-American. Rachna is, ‘an uber-heterosexual woman who has never considered any alternative to her sexuality. She’s an Indian woman who has grown up in a heterosexual paradigm of arranged marriages and marrying the right guy and going to parties and weddings. Rachna lives with the constant pressure to get married and have children.â? says Bedi.
The layering of the movie within a movie and the dual characters of Rachna and Kiran highlight one of the movie’s fundamental themes: the roles we all play. Bedi phrases it as, ‘Rachna has so many questions about her identity. She has this desperate need to jump into her acting roles, and she brings them into every aspect of her life.â?Â
The film will start the film festival circuit mid year so it will be interesting to see which company chooses to distribute it internationally and hopefully release it in 2008/09. When the film is released, Purva hopes ‘that the audience can walk out with some kind of a change in them. I think that’s a successful film. It challenges the viewer to see something they hadn’t seen or considered before in themselves.â?Â
