Page 89 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

74 Lotte Hoek

Jenny’s first film Heat, released in 2001, has been considered to mark a
watershed after which films have come to rely on such sequences to sell.
Made when she was about 15 years old, Heat had included scenes in which
Jenny was shown topless. The censorship controversies that came in the
wake of the film’s release made Jenny instantly famous. She became the
unchallenged queen of the so-called “romantic action” genre, producers
eagerly casting her as villain-slaying slum queen or sexually hungry college
girl. These cheaply produced action movies combined plots detailing urban
decay and corruption with elaborate fighting scenes and impossible
romances. Jenny had made her name as an actress of this most prominent
genre of romantic action movies.
In terms of cinema content, these transformations can be summed up
in the move from melodramatic movies dealing with romantic love to
action films focusing on sex (see Raju 2002). In the 1970s, family audi-
ences watched family dramas and love stories acted out by celebrated
actors and actresses with a past in stage performance. At the beginning
of the twenty-first century, young men watched urban action movies
with pornographic subplots acted out by actors and actresses who were
regularly sued for their impropriety (Hoek 2006). In 2004, for example,
84 feature films were released in Bangladesh. Of these, nine were roman-
tic movies centering on family relations. One was a parallel film (Durotto
Morshedul Islam), dealing with alienation in an upper middle class fam-
ily. The remaining 74 films were action movies, 14 of which featured the
heroine Jenny.
Jenny’s familiar figure could be discerned on film posters pasted to
walls throughout the country. Although she had never won a single film
award, didn’t feature in any discussions of contemporary cinema nor
counted among the great heroines of the day, Jenny’s image was omnipres-
ent. When after a day of fieldwork on set, I dropped a role of photographs
from the day’s shoot at the photo lab, the technician who printed the pic-
tures asked me, “this girl, is she really that beautiful?” The picture that his
machine released showed a radiant Jenny in close up, the white line across
the bridge of her nose only visible to those who were familiar with the opti-
cal illusion of straightness that makeup artists tended to apply. Jenny’s skin

had been smoothed under a thick layer of yellowish concealer, making her
skin a couple of shades lighter. Her dark eyes were accentuated with a thick
stroke of eyeliner, its color offset by an arch of bright eye shadow. Her lips
were crimson red. Along her collar bone, adorned with costume jewelry,
the edge of a bright orange and densely embroidered sari was just visible.
Shiny black hair extensions cascaded onto the dress. Among them sat a
plastic floral arrangement, in colors matching the sari. “Yes,” I said, “She
really is that beautiful.”