Shall we dance?

Illustration/Uday Mohite

You know, I have always found the phrase "age is just a number" mystifying, yaniki, irritating. What does it actually mean? That age is meaningless?

That numbers are meaningless? Maybe the phrase is meaningless.

Take movies - at what age is a man too old to be desirable, play the main lead, be rediscovered by some adoring indie (dude) director? And women? Yeah, well. "Woh work nahin karega" as they say in showbiz.

This is a running theme in the French show, Call My Agent, which just concluded on Netflix. Featuring famous actors, not only playing themselves but sending themselves up, the show is richly tender in its enjoyment of actors - their effing eccentricities and their ineffable stardom, and by extension, art's ability to reflect our human selves, and transcend the limitations of "reality". It is also stylishly, naughtily critical of the industry's sexism and ageism.

The first episode features Cecil de France being rejected for a part in a Tarantino film because he has a "problem with her age". In the penultimate episode, Sigourney Weaver comes to France for a film thinking her love interest is a hot, new and much younger actor, only to discover it's an actor near her age, but far from her equal in stardom. She refuses. She is exhorted to meet the actor, described as a font of sexy energy, who stolidly informs her ki "at my age, I don't choose a film on the basis of director or co-stars but number of sitting scenes". "A slow dance" is fine he says, whereupon Weaver calls on a young man to dance with her, the lindy hop. The infectious energy of their careening kicks and turns pulls others in, creating a mini American musical moment. Like only song and dance can do, it conveys everything without having to say it - that age is not just a number for women, who must constantly demonstrate that they have verve, fullness and humanity.

The episode is more American in its overt political statement, unlike the series' more charmingly sidelong style. It doesn't feel like an empty slogan, because it is backed up by a creative eco-system, so to speak. Genius dude directors, are always represented as faintly ridiculous and a little stupid. "I can't see it," says the (dude) director when it's suggested that Weaver romance a younger man. "I don't believe in it," says the (gents) distributor - even while evidence of younger men admiring older women surrounds him. Meanwhile, in the several film shoots depicted on the show, the directors and much of the crew, are almost always women. It's never pointed out as unusual, and its routine presence conveys, that to see things differently, you need different actions, and different people to say "Action!".

Who gets to dance is an indication of how we see them - and how we don't. In Hindi films, where dance is a fixture, when older women dance, their age is underlined, making it an aberration. Sometimes, a reference to their past as dancing stars, sometimes exotic (Rukmini, Rukmini, in Roja), sometimes patronisingly cutesy, blushes following tiny thumkas. I dream of cool older women saying #BoreMatKarYaar to allegedly realistic art, which can't imagine anything, but the patriarchal prisons of dolorous dollys and cantankerous kittys. I wait for them to look into our eyes (and hearts) and utter that slogan of liberation: shall we dance?

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com