The ‘Ladies & Ladies’ teaser for Yash’s ambitious film Toxic isn’t so much a promotional video as it is a glorified AXE deodorant ad. I wonder how the censor board will react to these 101 seconds of misogyny—and the hours to come soon.
The video sets out to introduce the women stars of Geetu Mohandas’s dark universe, but ends up becoming a cringefest loaded with flashes of awkward intimate scenes full of Yash’s biceps, triceps, and all other ’ceps. Just when you think it can’t get more baffling, the teaser drops its final excruciating line, as the voiceover reminds ladies not to forget “the predictable spectacle of men and their c**ks.” Truly, poetry. I had to rewatch the teaser a couple of times to make sure that I wasn’t hallucinating.
This isn’t even the first time the makers have fumbled the women-first promise. Every bit of promotional material for Toxic, including the film’s very first teaser, has been essentially a Yash showreel, with the women reduced to background props.
When fans called it out and demanded the women actors finally get their due, the makers responded with… this. A teaser supposedly built around the “leading ladies”, where Yash still manages to hog the spotlight. Not one woman gets a line of dialogue. Not one is afforded more than five to 10 seconds of screen time. The irony of promising a ‘ladies’ teaser’ and centring it entirely around a man appears to have sailed clean over the makers’ heads.
What is harder to digest is that the film is written and directed by a woman. Every clip that has made it to screen so far feels engineered strictly for the male gaze, which makes the whole thing sting a bit more.
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‘Toxic’ needs censor scissors
For possibly the first time ever, I will be switching sides in the never-ending tug-of-war between filmmakers and the CBFC. Toxic needs a long, hard pass through the editing room.
I don’t say this lightly. Typically, I’m not a fan of the CBFC’s censor scissors. This is, after all, the same board that treated a 33-second mid-air kiss in James Gunn’s Superman like a full-blown crisis last year, chopping it out on grounds of being ‘overly sensual’.
They blurred glasses of alcohol in Ford v Ferrari (2019)—not brand logos, which is the usual practice, but the actual act of two grown men sipping a drink. CBFC’s greatest hits don’t stop there. ‘Besharam Rang’ from Pathaan (2023) got specific shots trimmed for showing a bit too much of Deepika Padukone’s buttocks.
Back in 2017, then-CBFC chief Pahlaj Nihalani wanted the word ‘intercourse’ muted from the promos of Shah Rukh Khan and Anushka Sharma’s rom-com Jab Harry Met Sejal on the grounds that the Indian audiences weren’t ready.
You can see why it’s a strange feeling for me to find myself rooting for the very censors I regularly side-eye.
And yet, here we are. If there was ever a teaser (or, for that matter, a film) that deserved the CBFC’s trademark heavy-handedness, it’s Toxic.
The makers wanted their ‘Ladies & Ladies’ teaser to go viral. Well, it has—just not for the reasons they hoped. Taste and judgement may have left the chat, but somewhere in the edit room, so did irony.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)