‘Chutney Popcorn’ Isn’t About Being Queer or Indian (and That’s Why it’s Great)
In Conversation with Actor-Comedian Rita Sengupta
By Madelyn Gee
This interview is excerpted from an episode of Technicolor Theatre podcast, which originally aired on August 24, 2020. Listen to the full interview or read the transcript.
Rita Sengupta is a queer South Asian American actor and comedian based in Brooklyn, NY. She chats with podcast host and filmmaker Aditya Joshi about coming out to a South Asian family, queer representation, and Nisha Ganatra’s absurd and heartfelt debut film Chutney Popcorn (1999). Highlights from the conversation are below, edited for clarity.
Aditya: I feel like this happens a lot with queer movies, where the narrative centers around the coming-out story. The really interesting thing about Chutney Popcorn is that it doesn’t. Everyone knows that Reena is gay, and that’s fine.
Rita: So many queer movies are centered on the struggle, the coming out, and they’ve become stereotypical now even though they’re, of course, important. I just love that the story with Reena’s mom is not the fact that she’s gay or lesbian or whatever. She’s just not living the life that her mom wants her to lead.
Aditya: It never feels like her mom is ashamed of any of those things. It’s more just like, “What are you doing?” or generally, “Get your shit together.”
Rita: Immigrant parents just want the best for their kids. I think it’s always steeped in their love for their child of, “All I want is the best for you. I came to this country to make your life easier.” Reena’s mom saying things like, “This could just be easier if you married men or had a husband or whatever.” I think that all just comes from that immigrant parent perspective.
With my dad — I don’t actually know if he actually said this, but he definitely meant it — “It would maybe be easier.” It’s hard to be gay in America, and life is more difficult for you. I think it comes back to not necessarily hatred or anything like an ignorance of who you are. It is more like, “All I want is the best for you.”
Aditya: As both of us being artists who went to good schools and studied not-art, there’s definitely something that resonated with me in the way Reena’s sister and her mom are like, “Oh, it’s just the pictures that she takes.” The kind of hobby-ish way that they describe what she is super passionate about. I work at Capital One, and my parents were like, “You can just keep working at Capital One and keep making movies. It’s a good balance.” I’m like, “No, I want to quit and do other stuff.”
Rita: That’s funny because when I decided to pursue acting full-time, I felt like I almost had to come out to my parents. It was like, “An actor too?” I came out to my dad as an actor before I came out to him that I am gay. I was like, “These are baby steps.” Hasan Minhaj has a bit in his Netflix special. I can’t remember the name of it now, but you’re playing cards with your family, and you’re like, “Okay, I’m gonna deal this card now. I’m an artist; let’s see how that works. Play it out for a couple of years. Now I’m gay. How does that work? Don’t do it all at the same time.”
I definitely feel like I did that with my family. It’s funny because when I tell my dad about auditions that I get, I can see him trying to get it. He still calls them interviews because he’s like, “I’m gonna try to make this as professional as I can. How are your interviews doing?” I’m like, “Oh, you mean like my audition?”
“I came out to my dad as an actor before I came out to him that I am gay.”
Aditya: So you also had a corporate job before you decided to go fully into acting. How did that play into your decision-making when you moved to New York to be an actor?
Rita: My parents’ practicality, that immigrant practicality, is definitely steeped in my blood. It’s when I had a nine-to-five normal job; I worked at a startup. Then, I started acting more on the side. Then when I decided to do it full time, I very much was like, “Okay, I need to make sure I have all my ducks in a row. How much savings do I have? What is my plan? I’m going to be a freelancer — I need to make sure I have clients booked up so I can still work.”
I would slowly introduce it to them to the point that when I decided to move to New York, they got it. They understood and were like, “Okay, this is feasible, she knows what she’s doing, and we’ll figure it out.” I was doing freelance for about three years. With quarantine and Corona and everything, my clients started to leave me. So I was like, “Alright, let me actually be stable.” That’s so important for creativity too. Honestly, something that I’ve learned as an artist is that having financial stability is really important for me and my creativity.
Aditya: You mentioned the fact that you’re in an interracial queer relationship. This is obviously a very central part of Chutney Popcorn. I felt it was a refreshing take on an interracial relationship because both moms were pretty accepting of the other people.
Rita: When we see an interracial relationship like The Big Sick, for example, it’s all about the other culture. Whereas like, Reena just happens to be an interracial relationship. They just happen to be together and come from different cultures. Reena just happens to be a lesbian. This is what I want queer film and TV to be like, going forward. But this movie was made in 1999. I love that.
“Having financial stability is really important for me and my creativity.”
Aditya: The tough thing is, we haven’t really seen another film like this since. It didn’t make a ton of money or launch a ton of careers. Even though Nisha Ganatra has gotten a bunch of stuff, they’ve tended to be more formulaic studio movies. I do feel like we’re getting to a place where these movies will start to be elevated, though. Maybe it’s just that people are open to having these conversations now.
You talk about how you want a queer movie to be in your future. How, in the movies that you’re writing and the shorts that you’re writing, does your queerness play into that?
Rita: Honestly, it’s exactly like what Nisha Ganatra did. I just want to be an actor who plays different characters but I don’t necessarily want it to be about me being South Asian or being queer. I just want those things to just come out naturally. We see Reena’s culture, and we see the Indianness with her doing henna. We see it with the reception, the clothing they wear, and the food they’re eating, but it’s not about them being Indian, you know? It’s just infused in the storyline.
Aditya: Maybe it’s just my ignorance, but I feel like we get a lot of gay male movies, but not a lot of movies about lesbians. Lesbian cinema is pretty limited. The only movie I can think of getting a big play in the last few years was Carol.
Rita: I feel like it’s starting to make a comeback. That is a big thing with queer representation. A lot of it is not just gay men, but white gay men, you know? I think with any underrepresented group, white people are the first to tell the story. If they’re not white, then it’s men. Their stories are generally shown first. Being a queer Asian woman, you definitely don’t see a lot of stories. They’re not going to be the highlight, but then slowly, that starts to pass along to other parts of that minority community.
“With any underrepresented group, white people are the first to tell the story. If they’re not white, then it’s men. Their stories are generally shown first.”
Aditya: What do you think is the lasting legacy of this movie?
Rita: I think in the most simplest terms, especially for queer South Asian women, the lasting legacy of the movie is that it just simply exists, right? I can count on my hand the number of queer South Asian movies that have come out in the past 20 years, and Chutney Popcorn is almost always on the top of that list two decades later.
I think that because I can watch this movie 19 years after it was made and it very much encapsulates all the emotions and feelings that I have with my own relationships with my own mom, my sibling, my brother, my girlfriend. I think that is its lasting legacy.
And the way that Nisha Ganatra tells a story, she explores a lot of serious issues but in a light-hearted way. It almost gave me permission to tell the stories I want to tell, in the way I want to tell them. For me, with my artistry, I really like talking about serious issues in a comedic way. I think that she’s really reinforced that way of storytelling for me.
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