In November 2015, the Central Board for Film Certification (CBFC) — the apex body of film censorship in India — ordered the makers of the James Bond film Spectre to trim the length of kisses between Daniel Craig and his co-stars, Monica Bellucci and Léa Seydoux, by half. News of this bizarre diktat inspired lyricist, writer, comedian, and filmmaker Varun Grover to write a stand-up routine which eventually became KISS — his first short film.
In KISS, Grover distills India's fraught relationship with cinema and the people tasked with policing it into a biting satire set entirely inside an old-school preview theatre (in real life, Mumbai's iconic Liberty Cinema). Here, the titular kiss — its duration, propriety, and perceived obscenity — becomes key to his broader critique of creative control and censorship in India.
This setting was non-negotiable for Grover. "The space is very, very inherent to the story and very intertwined with the core theme which is censorship and our relationship with cinema," he says.
There was no way this film would have been set anywhere else instead of a film screening theatre.Varun Grover
The central conceit of KISS is deceptively simple: a kiss plays on screen. The filmmaker insists it lasts 28 seconds, but for each censor its duration varies from seconds to minutes. As tensions rise, time itself begins to warp. The narrative dissolves into surreal logic. As the film progresses, the characters — as well as the audience — are pulled into a dreamlike commentary on the absurdity of censorship and the deeply subjective nature of modesty and obscenity.
Grover uses the concept of time dilation — borrowed from physics and filtered through bureaucratic absurdity — to show how personal comfort and societal conditioning can shape our interpretation of art. "We all have our perception of time based on how comfortable we are with what we are doing," Grover says. "In the gym, if you're doing a squat or a plank, ten seconds can feel like a minute. Similarly, when something uncomfortable is on screen — violence, any kind of torture, love-making, or sex — time stretches."
It's a brilliant, bodily insight that censorship isn't so much about rules as it is about cognitive dissonance and perception warped by personal experience. In KISS, Grover uses this perceptual distortion to question the subjective nature of censorship in India.
Censorship in India, he suggests, is not governed by any coherent code, but by the internalised discomforts of individuals steeped in conservative social norms. "It is arbitrary because it is coming from individual life experiences… they are following their own experiences in life and then every person has a different life and those lives come in their decision."
And yet, Grover refuses to frame these arbiters of social values as antagonists in KISS. It is one of the film's more surprising — and mature — moves. The censors are absurd, yes, Grover argues, but "they are people like us, they are people who have lived in the same society, went to the same schools, same colleges."
It is very easy in stand-up comedy to make fun of people who I don't agree with or who I think are more orthodox than I am. But in a short film I wanted to have that sense of empathy, that feeling of trying to understand where they come from.Varun Grover
This emotional nuance is rare in Indian cinema's engagement with censorship. A lesser filmmaker would have resorted to ridicule or outrage. Grover, instead, holds up a mirror. He shows how those who stifle art are also its victims, trapped within systems of guilt, shame, and fear. They are both enforcers and casualties of a culture that treats art not as nourishment for the soul, but as something frivolous or dangerous.
This isn't just a cinematic issue — it reflects a broader societal anxiety in India. The kiss, after all, is a recurring site of controversy in Indian visual culture. From the outrage over Lipstick Under My Burkha to moral policing of streaming platforms, the politics of intimacy are continually under scrutiny. KISS plays with this fixation to unsettling effect, turning a moment of affection into a surreal indictment of repression.
Art is of value to our individual selves and our souls.Varun Grover
The stakes of KISS go beyond film certification. "For me KISS is a very personal reflection of how cinema affects us and how people think of censorship as a tool, how their mind works," Grover says. "I think the film fits into the larger narrative about our times especially with the idea of censorship, and how arts are seen as of lesser value than engineering or medicine or other stuff which people think is of value to society. But art is of value to our individual selves and our souls."
This marginalisation has real-world consequences — it translates into a regulatory regime where discomfort is pathologized, creativity is curtailed, and moral policing masquerades as a matter of good governance.
In the end, KISS is not just a film about censorship — it is a film about seeing, about how we look at others, at art, and at ourselves within this zeitgeist. Its brilliance lies in how it distorts perception to reveal the quiet violence of normative gaze. And in a country where the kiss still scandalises more than violence or hate speech, Grover's film serves as a timely, necessary provocation.
Varun Grover's KISS is currently streaming on MUBI.
If you enjoyed reading this, here's more from Homegrown:
Varun Grover’s Coming-of-Age Comic Karejwa Gives A Child’s Perspective On An Impending Apocalypse
How Manto & Ismat Chugtai Shaped Present-Day Politics Of Censorship In India