Dilip Mehta’s doc Mostly Sunny a refreshingly sex-positive look at porn

Share

Director Dilip Mehta cut his teeth in photojournalism and knew, even by age 19, that he would need to leave Canada to find the mentorship and creative freedom necessary to make a name for himself. Now, with a couple of Time magazine cover credits to his name, his award-winning coverage of the Bhopal gas tragedy, and three films as a director – the most recent of which, Mostly Sunny, premiered at The Toronto International Film Festival in September – it's hard to argue with his choice 45 years ago to leave Toronto for New York.

"I remember trying to look very seriously for a mentor, and it just never happened here," Mehta recalls. "I found mentorship in New York, not just from one person but from a handful of them: Eddie Adams, Douglas Kirkland, Mary Ellen Mark."

These days, Mehta – an animated 64-year-old – splits his time between Los Angeles and New Delhi, and the idea of lacking creative sustenance is a foggy thing of the distant past. This has been made possible in part because of a mutually beneficial working relationship with his Oscar-nominated sister, Deepa Mehta, whose socially conscious and big-ish-budget films (Water, Midnight's Children) have made the Mehtas a powerhouse sibling duo. Although his sister has a credit (for co-writing and creative consulting) on his new documentary, Mehta laughs and admits he just wanted a way to show gratitude for her continuing support and collaboration ("What does a writing credit mean on a documentary? There's no writing!").

Three years in the making, Mostly Sunny is a behind-the-scenes look at Sunny Leone – the most-Googled celebrity in India whose fame springs from her prolific career as a desi porn star. Now turning her sights on Bollywood cinema, the largest film industry on the planet, Leone is the subject of national awe and perpetually dropped jaws.

The adult entertainer-turned actor was born Karenjit Kaur Vohra to Sikh Punjabi parents in Sarnia, Ont. Mehta's documentary zooms in on the story of her close-knit family and the ways that they were disavowed by the small-town community because of Sunny's line of explicit work. In some ways, Mehta's film is as much a study of diaspora and sexual conservatism as it is about a global superstar whose name is synonymous with three Xs.

Like the Mehtas, Leone has a close relationship with her brother (whose name she usurped when she first started making pornography). Her brother Sundeep plays a key role in the documentary, ironing a shirt for work as he is asked questions from a voice off screen. Far from ashamed, he is proud of his sister and his perspective gives a sense of Leone as more than a fetish object. While his sister is interviewed in first-class cabins during transatlantic flights, in change rooms in India and picking up after her dog in L.A., the original Sunny stays put in his small apartment, working out the creases of his white shirt. He reads like the beaming and constant parent that Sunny herself never quite had.

Mehta attempts to show the various sides to Leone in his documentary, from the grieving daughter, to the doting wife, and to the fledgling actor capitalizing on her infamy. Throughout the film, we learn that Leone is a savvy business woman above all else, and, as she says without guile in one interview scene, "I was good at turning a quarter into a dollar."

Mehta explains that the Bollywood industry is keen to help her in this act of conversion: "She has a colourful visual history behind her because of her former avatar as an adult actor, so she's being used to fill the seats and also because she has a gazillion followers on social media. She's being used but she doesn't mind. She's being paid handsomely!"

Unashamed of her career trajectory, Leone is a rare (and sometimes haphazard) proponent of women's sexual freedom in India. "Sunny is a sexual Messiah," Mehta declares triumphantly. "Given where the country has veered, here comes this woman who is personable, unapologetic, terrifically good to look at, a sort of mediocre actor … I think she is spearheading a sexual revolution, which has been a long time in the making."

This may be overstating the case, but as Mostly Sunny reminds its audience, there is no sexual education in Indian schools and rape and abuse are rampant across the ballooning population of 1.2 billion. Deepa Mehta's Anatomy of Violence (which also debuted at this year's TIFF) is a fictionalized retelling of the events that lead up to the heinous gang rape of Jyoti Singh on a bus in Delhi in 2012. When her brother heard the news of this crime, he rethought his involvement in the Leone documentary, wary of entering a thorny subject in the wake of a devastating crime. But after a three-and-a-half-hour meeting with Leone, the director was struck by her honesty.

"I told her that if we were going to work together I had one caveat: You have to share all, otherwise it's pointless," Mehta says, adding, "The singular quality that glued itself to the film was her honesty."

Mehta realized that a documentary about Leone might be another way of exploring the issue of violent and fatal crimes that are perpetrated against women in India. The director thought to himself: "This could be a good way of exploring the subject, but not in an in-your-face way, not too on the nose. Instead, I would enter this frame obliquely." While the Mehta siblings are hardly the first to tell the stories of people's fraught relationship to sexuality in India (think of the incredible films The World Before Her and the feisty pink saris of Gulabi Gang, for instance), with Mostly Sunny a refreshingly sex-positive narrative gets its voice.

Despite this, it's sad to say that Leone does not make for a particularly captivating interview subject, and the politics of her career in pornography don't seem of great interest to her. This during a time when there is a glut of articulate porn stars taking to platforms big and small – whether it be book deals or the 140-character limits of Twitter – and talking incisively about their profession.

Think of Stoya, who wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times about adult stars' right to privacy and later called out the sexist culture of the industry (and accused fellow porn star and ex-boyfriend James Deen of rape) on social media. Then there is Sasha Grey, who speaks freely of her adult film career while successfully transitioning into Hollywood movies and writing novels. And also Asa Akira the porn actress, director and author who resolutely identifies as a feminist.

By contrast, in Mostly Sunny our heroine gets flustered (and almost annoyed) when asked onscreen about the complicated tension between porn and rape. Uneasy lies the head that wears a rhinestone crown, to be sure, but Leone doesn't seem aware of the weight of what she has come to represent.

For women and men trying to navigate the hot-button topic of sexual politics in India and across the Internet, Leone is a symbol of liberation – but does it matter if your messiah is unwitting? Wake me up when Stoya sells the film rights to her story.

Mostly Sunny is available on iTunes Jan. 10, and opens theatrically Jan. 13.