The other problem I had was in the strategic decision to dove-tail a same-sex relationship within a disability context. Is she just a girl with normal feelings trapped in a body bound in a wheel chair? I think the issue is not so simple. What was Laila’s passion? The film does not reveal and so the film is very uni-dimensional in that sense. Truth be told, if Laila were a real person of my acquaintance, I hardly think that I would be friends with her. I came away knowing very little about her. For a writer who gets accepted into an American College on a scholarship for Creative Writing, she has very little to show for her depth in her personality and her quest for life and love. But what about Laila? Who is she? What does she love? Who does she love? What does love means to her? What are her aspirations, fears and world-view? She was like one of those hyper hormonal adolescents I know who are so uninteresting. I am totally cool with Laila’s promiscuity.
The whole point of the film is about Laila and her coming to terms with her libido, and her winning ways to claim love (sex), unsuccessfully or successfully. Because in F.R.I.E.N.D.S anything that everyone does is cool and normal. It was like an episode from F.R.I.E.N.D.S without the explicit sex scenes, and the friends here are either in a wheelchair or physically challenged in some other way. After all, why do we see porn? We see others make it, the different ways in which they make it, circumstances under which they make it, and different partner combinations making it. Remember those well made porn films, with a story, where the entire action takes place within a clever plot?! I was very hard pressed to differentiate this film from those. Swinging from acknowledging and portraying the sexual needs of one or two disabled young women, this film traces the arc all the way to disabled pornography as a show-and-tell for the ‘normal’. I also will try to wear my health activist lenses for a moment and try to interpret the message from the point of view of someone who has fought aggressively for the rights of everything that is marginalised, oppressed, suppressed, and less understood.
I want to reflect on the film from my own point of view as a woman with a locomotor disability who has been unashamed of her sexuality, and from the point of view as a member of the community who is largely unacquainted with issues related to disability and sexuality, but who is deeply empathetic. I want to talk about the film from two, no three perspectives because I think it is important.
The performances were top notch, the credentials of the makers and all involved are bonafide. I saw “Margarita, with a Straw” with a great amount of curiosity and expectation.
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