A gay boy rejected by his best friend being consoled by his supportive mother, a couple ruminating about their future on the beach, and a man catching a taxi on a rainy day, not expecting that his boyfriend will break up with him before he reaches home. And it all transpires on the same day: February 14, Valentine’s Day.
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Valentine @ 3 (2022), directed by Mani Shankar Iyer is an ode to gay love, Chennai and Ilaiyaraaja songs, all rolled into one. The narrative feature film, which weaves together 3 stories of gay men of different age groups, was screened at the Out & Loud Pune International Queer Film Festival, held from May 24-26 at Max Mueller Bhavan in Pune. It also garnered Best Indian Narrative Feature Film and Best of Out and Loud PIQFF 2024.
Featuring Shylaja Chetlur, Shriviyas, Raj Kumar, Mohan Kumar Malika, Pradeep Vijayan and Rakesh, Valentine @ 3 is honest and relatable, sketching three pictures of ordinary life and love struggles in familiar, middle-class Indian settings, with gay characters serving as the focal point.
The stories
The unique anthology is entirely in Tamil, and features no background score, allowing the conversations between the characters to play the central role. The only music we hear is by Ilaiyaraaja; a few bars hummed by a boy, a snippet playing on the radio, being shared by a man with his lover.
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The first story features a fresh-faced 18-year-old college boy studying visual communications. Sathya has a crush on Melvin, his friend of many years, and has decided to confess his feelings to him on Valentine’s Day. Sadly, he not only gets rejected (and slapped), but also gets outed without his consent by another friend. As he mopes in bed, his mother tries to console him and offer bracing advice, over a cup of coffee. She also listens patiently as he fondly reminisces about his memories with Melvin— meeting him in high school, their first bike ride, being taken care of when he had a fever, and visiting Melvin’s family. “I made sure to step into the house with my right foot,” he tells his mother seriously, saying that they might, after all, be his in-laws.
A still from ‘Valentine @ 3’ | Photo Credit: Sruthi Darbhamulla
His supportive mother also tells him that it requires courage to confess his emotions and that he stays true to his friendship, assuring him that this is important. Later, when Melvin calls, and Sathya hesitates to pick up, she picks up for him, telling Melvin that their friendship matters, reiterating her wise words to her son.
Then, we see the second story, that of a couple, Prabhu and Kannan, two 26-year-olds in love and in the closet. They are meeting secretly at the beach after work, and their conversation turns to their families and future, which seems hazy at best. Today is the second anniversary of Kannan confessing his feelings to Prabhu. Kannan, especially, is panicked about a future with his boyfriend and worries about how to face his military dad. As they discuss their lives — at times seriously, at others lightly — an unexpected and sweet twist follows which solidifies their relationship and strengthens the bond between them.
Story three is of taxi driver Karavannan and passenger Sarakesh, a theatre actor he picks up on a rainy night. What starts as an everyday occurrence acquires layers as the passenger undergoes an unexpected breakup via phone call with his boyfriend Azaar, who has gotten engaged to a woman. His driver, of course, can hear everything, much to Sarakesh’s chagrin.
A still from ‘Valentine @ 3’ | Photo Credit: Sruthi Darbhamulla
Karavannan is, however, sympathetic. He has a heart-wrenching story of his own; in trying to console his passenger, the taxi driver too opens up about his painful past. Interwoven in the narrative is a glimpse into the Hindu-Muslim conflict— Sarakesh lost his childhood friend Kabir as well as his dad to riots in his little town. Blackmail, custodial violence, sexual abuse, fears of homophobia and deep loss further mark the story that unspools over the course of their conversation.
At the very end of the anthology, all three stories come together in pleasant serendipity at a little cafe, with a welcoming Pride flag hanging on its wall.
The creator
Valentine@3 is the brainchild of Mani Shankar Iyer, an independent filmmaker whose work is mainly in the Tamil language. After numerous short films and features, Iyer released his first feature film Sattham in 2019. It grossed 65 awards; he does one better with his second feature film, Valentine @3, which has notched 73 awards. It was also the opening film at Utsav Film Festival in Mumbai and the closing film at the Chennai International Queer Film Festival.
Mani Shankar Iyer speaks at the Out & Loud Film Pune International Queer Film Festival | Photo Credit: Sruthi Darbhamulla
The director shares that after he made his first featurette about the LGBTQ community, he met many people from the community and discovered many stories to be told. This has driven him to make more films centred on the LGBTQ experience — narratives such as Valentine@3 are the result.
Iyer is inspired by the works of Iranian filmmakers. The idea for an anthology, though, he got from the work of National Award-winning Tamil director Vasanth (Sivaranjiniyum Innum Sila Pengalum) who he has assisted on some films.
When asked for a recommendation for a well-made film centring on gay or LGBTQ narratives, Iyer names the film How to Win at Checkers (Every Time), a 2015 film by Thai-Korean director Josh Kim in which explorations of sexuality meet a tale of corruption and poverty. He says that Thailand, in general, is doing good work when it comes to telling LGBTQ narratives, with the storylines being “very intense,” for both films and drama series (popularly known as Boy’s Love dramas, BLs for short).
“Of course, India is going very fast,” he adds. “We are not lagging behind anywhere.” He points to Fire, Deepa Mehta’s trailblazing 1996 film, and also mentions Sachin Kundalkar’s Cobalt Blue, incidentally set in Pune,and Aligarh, which stars Manoj Bajpayee, as notable recent works in India pertaining to the LGBTQ experience.
And his own of course. Valentine @ 3 is made on a humbler scale, shot in three and a half days on a budget of two lakhs. Rehearsals, however, took place over several months. Each setting in the film was shot in a single take, he reveals. The final story in the taxi was shot in a 38-minute-long single shoot. The camera was set up such that a viewer feels like they are looking at a conversation, he says, emphasising that cinema is a visual medium.
Iyer also emphasised authenticity for his actors, saying that he told them that if they went out and “someone asks them ‘hey you’re not really gay, phek raha hain na (you’re pretending)‘, then you’ve failed,” but if they “asked for your number, you have succeeded.”
