Dorothy wants to tell a bold trans cultural tale, but a lack of nuance keeps getting in the way

The exasperating thing about conservative outrage against progressive art is that it threatens to shrink the space for legitimate, calm critiques of the works in question. Social media stormtroopers and their offline counterparts are bent on draining nuance out of conversations on popular cinema, demanding that commentators pick either anti or pro camps.

But nuance is precious and indispensable. It is what allows us to condemn LGBT-phobic attacks against writer-director Karthik Subbaraj's Dorothy, even while calling out troubling aspects of the gender representation in this Tamil-language drama.

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Dorothy, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, is set in a caste-ridden, cruelly patriarchal rural milieu in Tamil Nadu where Karthi and Subbu grow up together. When we meet them as children, Subbu is aggressive, and gets into physical fights to protect the mild-mannered Karthi from bullies. Subbu's father is a callous, violence-prone moneylender who takes Karthi under his wing. This partially explains why Karthi grows into an aggressive man, but not why Subbu transforms into a gentler soul.

The combination of cinematographer S Thirunavukkarasu's striking visuals and Ilaiyaraaja's hypnotic music on Karthik's grand canvas in Dorothy is so powerful, that it briefly overshadows the director's prioritisation of presentation over building character arcs. Soon enough, the giant shift in Karthi's and Subbu's personalities from childhood to adulthood within a confusing non-linear narrative that keeps switching from black and white to colour becomes too much to take in.

When Subbu's brother marries the sweet, kind Dorothy, both Karthi and Subbu are fascinated by her, though for very different reasons as we later find out. And herein lies a bigger problem.

A real-world individual may stay closeted in an oppressive society. But when a screenplay keeps a fictional character's gender identity and/or sexual orientation hidden from viewers merely to spring a surprise on us - like a twist in a whodunnit - this writing choice calls for scrutiny. The fact that it may be deemed a spoiler to state here that a primary character in Dorothy is a transgender woman is a fundamental issue with Karthik's film.

In treating a transgender person as a plot device and an element of suspense, while falling short on character development, Dorothy contributes in part to the very socio-cultural 'othering' that it purports to address.

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Of course, Indian cinema has done much worse, even in recent years. Of course, Dorothy is far removed, for instance, from Raghava Lawrence's horrifying 2011 Tamil film Kanchana, remade in 2020 as the Hindi Laxmii, featuring Akshay Kumar's horrendously caricaturish acting as a cis man possessed by a transgender ghost.

But the bar cannot be so low for our filmmakers, especially since India has increasingly been doing much better. We have seen the empathetic writing of well-fleshed-out transgender leads in Njaan Marykkutty (Malayalam), Super Deluxe (Tamil), B 32 Muthal 44 Vare (Malayalam) and the English-Hindi streaming series, Made In Heaven, in the 2018-2023 period.

We have seen a further evolution, the casting of transgender actors as transgender characters, in films like Aabhaasam starring Sheethal Shyam, Gargi with Sudha S, a lovely Bhima Jewellery ad featuring the model Meera Singhania Rehani, and (again) Made In Heaven, starring Trinetra Haldar.

None of this matters though to self-appointed guardians of Indian 'kulchur' panicking over a trans woman and a cis man kissing in Dorothy. For this in itself, the film becomes significant. To be fair, there's more to it than that. The fact is that despite my reservations, I was moved in places in the second half by the immersive sincerity of actors Sananth and Rishikanth's performances as Subbu and Karthi respectively, the angelic presence of Keerthy Suresh--the marquee name in the cast--in the title role, and Ilaiyaraaja's compositions.

Dorothy does not have the awareness levels or intellectual heft to pull off its intended subversion of Indian cinema's yaari-dosti genre. But it has its moments. The irritation it has caused conservatives is a collateral pleasure.