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Kama Sutra: A Tale Of Love

1996, Movie, NR, 115 mins

KAMA SUTRA: A TALE OF LOVE | KAMA SUTRA
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Director Mira Nair bounces back from the fairly embarrassing PEREZ FAMILY with this delicious masala of sex, erotic intrigue and high melodrama, set in 16th-century India. Princess Tara (Sarita Choudhury) and her servant girl, Maya (Indira Varma), may have been friends as children, but once the girls hit sexual maturity, jealousy rears its ugly head. The lowly Maya is clearly the more desirable -- she's sexually uninhibited -- and sleeping with Tara's fiance, Raj Singh (Naveen Andrews), on the eve of his wedding doesn't help assuage Tara's envy. Maya is banished from the palace, but vengeance is hers: She enrolls in a sex school run by Rasa Devi (played with relish by the Bollywood legend Rekha), where young women are trained in the sexual calisthenics of the Kama Sutra, and Maya returns to the palace as the Raj's chief courtesan. It's all a lot closer to the kind of soft-core pulp one is more likely to find on late-night cable than the local art-house cinema, but rarely has pulp been handled with such opulence: Every detail is simply stunning. Nair has fashioned an erotic fantasy that's clearly intended for Western consumption -- no film with this amount of frank sexuality would ever make it past censors in her native India, which is probably one reason why it was shot in English. And if her film, with its hothouse harems and hazy opium dens, trucks in Hollywood's distinctly orientalist view of South Asia, it does so with a knowing sense of humor. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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