National award-winning actress Shefali Shah, who made her directorial debut with the short film 'Happy Birthday Mummyji', recently opened up on the liberating aspects of the story that revolves around a homemaker stuck alone away from her family amid the COVID-19 induced lockdown.
Once she begins getting comfortable with her freedom of eating non-veg (given that she's married into a Jain family), lazing in the pool and sipping on some wine, Shefali also sealed the film with self-pleasure.
In an interview with Filmfare, Shefali revealed the details behind the 'masturbation' scene that simply involves telling her husband that she has fever and can’t come home just yet. Her character Suchi, then goes on to grab the hand faucet as she lay in a bathtub surrounded by candles.
Shefali said, “Someone asked me if I had committed suicide! I was like ‘barbaad! What movie have you been watching because I was watching something else!”
“It literally has a ‘happy ending’. And yes, women do that. I mean we could turn a blind eye and pretend that they don’t have sexual needs but they do. Women do snap their bras the moment no one is looking or pull their wedgies out. And particularly on screen, she doesn’t have to be prim, proper and put together and well behaved. They belch, they burp and they fart. So period,” she added.
In an earlier interview with IANS, Shefali had said, "During the lockdown, every one of us was so in each other's face that after a point of time, we all just wanted to get away from everything. There was no mental space we had for ourselves because on one hand we had work-from-home and on the other hand we had duties to be fulfilled to our families. There was no breather really, and the story stems from there."
'Happy Birthday Mummyji' released on July 23 on Royal Stag Barrel Select Large Short Films and its YouTube channel.
Shefali has made her presence felt in every opportunity that she got - be it smashing the patriarchy in the Neeraj Ghaywan's short 'Juice', playing the 'mother' of superstars like Priyanka Chopra, Ranveer Singh in 'Dil Dhadakne Do', and Akshay Kumar in the film 'Waqt: The Race Against Time', be it DCP Vartika Chaturvedi in International Emmy Awards winning web series 'Delhi Crime' and the recently released anthology 'Ajeeb Daastaans'.
Currently the actress is quite occupied with the shooting of two films - Ayushmann Khurrana-starrer 'Doctor G' and Alia Bhatt-starrer 'Darlings'.
