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.
