I’m sure you’ve judged Sunny Leone whenever you’ve come across her name, if not now, sometime in the past. If you’ve not judged her, you must’ve thought of her as someone you can’t mention to ‘decent’ people in broad daylight. Karenjit Kaur: The Untold Story Of Sunny Leone proves that you have no right to judge Sunny Leone because she’s just like the rest of us, someone who has a story to tell. If you’re going in to watch what you’d expect to be the raunchy past of an adult entertainer, you’ll probably be disappointed. Who you’ll meet is a simple girl bought up in a conservative NRI Punjabi home, with an understanding father and a protective mother that wouldn’t allow her to step out of the house in a short skirt or spaghetti straps. How did a girl like that end up in the adult entertainment industry? That’s where the crux of the story lies.
Sunny Leone’s life itself is intriguing enough to be documented. But you would never anticipate the emotional journey that she has been through which has been beautifully shown in the web series. As far as biopics in Bollywood are concerned, they’re often condensed in a 3-hour film, trying to depict the good, bad and the ugly of the person living or dead. And more often than not they whitewash the image of the person like many claims has been done to the Sanjay Dutt biopic. But Karenjit Kaur is in no hurry to rush to the end of her story.
Stills from Karenjit Kaur: The Untold Story Of Sunny Leone
Stills from Karenjit Kaur: The Untold Story Of Sunny Leone
Stills from Karenjit Kaur: The Untold Story Of Sunny Leone
Stills from Karenjit Kaur: The Untold Story Of Sunny Leone
Stills from Karenjit Kaur: The Untold Story Of Sunny Leone
Stills from Karenjit Kaur: The Untold Story Of Sunny Leone
She tells you her version of events in 10 chapters of approximately 18 minutes each. She doesn’t hold back either, even while she tells us about the financial issues that her family faced that nudged her to consider posing for magazines. While it would have been only too easy for her to have blamed someone for pushing her into the adult entertainment industry, Sunny vehemently refuses to do so. She never once blames her family for choosing the career path she did. In fact, she clarifies that it wasn’t them, it was her choice. This is something that comes up in the film more than I thought it would. She bares it all, in more ways than one, in fact, we get an insight into her problems of living with a materialistic father, an alcoholic mother and the all too familiar nosy relatives we all have. By the end, we are trying to find the answer to who Sunny really is, Karenjit or Sunny? She doesn’t answer it for us, because she herself does not know. The web series has managed to depict her story without glorifying her, in fact, there are chances of more judgments coming her way. It is unabashed yet heartwarming to see her story. Even if it is scenes where she does get intimate with someone for the first time, you don’t feel like it is something raunchy, it looks beautiful. We see flashbacks back to when she was 12 or 13 to when she was 18 or 19.
But the entire series looks like an ode to her uncomfortable interview with Bhupendra Chaubey back in 2016. Where she had received a lot of praise from the people for being graceful under fire. Chaubey’s character seems a little overplayed. The storyline weaves in and out of the uncomfortable moments she faced through that interview as she tells an apparently misogynistic and rude interviewer her entire story. It almost feels like she was giving back all the answers she should’ve during that interview, a delayed gratification of sorts. But this is what makes the story more human, minus a few slow-motion scenes, but I would do that too if I had my biopic made. And this is why you never once feel like judging her because she’s told her story honestly but in a way so relatable that you feel that at some point and time you might just have known a 13-year-old Karenjit.
Check out the trailer.
Her story most definitely has not come to end. She leaves us wanting to know more. And she does have a lot to touch upon, her entry into hardcore pornography, her parents’ death, her growing relationship with her husband. We will hopefully get to see this in the second season of the web series and we can’t wait!
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