We were used to seeing young love till Amitabh Bachchan pined for Hema Malini in Baghban, warming up Indian sensibilities to romance between the grays. The onscreen couple is ready to rekindle with Baghban director Ravi Chopra’s untitled next. However, this time, their expression of love may border on the intimate just as the film it is based on, The Bridges of Madison County, where Meryl Streep has an extra-marital fling with Clint Eastwood.

While the intimate scenes in the film will be “modified to suit Indian sensibilities”, according to Chopra, the question is whether this will be as popularly received as Baghban was. Hema Malini is positive. “The audiences are getting bolder which is why filmmakers are willing to take such risks,” she says.

Agrees director Shoojit Sircar, whose next, Johnny Mastana (also a Bachchan-starrer, with Sarika this time) has a similar theme. “Johnny is about how two people in love for 25 years fall in love all over again. We have a few tastefully done romantic scenes between the two actors,” says Sircar.

VK Prakash’s Phir Kabhi and Kabir Sadanand’s Tum Milo To Sahi are other films in 2009 with similar storylines. In Phir Kabhi, high-school lovers Mithun Chakravarty and Dimple Kapadia rekindle their love decades later, at a school reunion. An extramarital affair is part of the plot, but Kapadia chooses to call it an extramarital emotional relationship “as the word ‘affair’ has sexual connotations to it. In this film, we rekindle only the platonic part of our long-lost love”.

Tum Milo, which also stars Kapadia opposite Nana Patekar, shows how a lawyer becomes the emotional support for his client. The film, due to release in March, portrays the “intense, meaningful relationship” between two old people and will be shown with subtle, read-it-between-the-lines undertone.

What sets these two films apart is the approach of the directors. Sadanand says the cinematic treatment of romancing seniors differs because elders would usually show more refrain in their expression. “At 60, you don’t scream from the rooftop; at that age, you need someone to talk to, to share your problems and insecurities of growing old,” he says.

Prakash confesses that the two actors don’t even touch even once in the film. “It revolves around emotions —the physical aspect of love takes a backseat at that age,” he says.

The directors are unanimous in their response when asked if they had to face criticism for such portrayals. “We did have to fight cultural bias, as many Indian households witness grandparents sleeping in different rooms or a distance between the partners. But the perception that love is a premium of the young is incorrect, and is changing,” says director Reema Kagti, whose film Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd had Boman Irani romancing Shabana Azmi amid several other young couples. The two were again seen together in Sorry Bhai, where Irani, in one of scenes, grabs Azmi into a lip-lock.

Indeed, exposure to world cinema via satellite TV and multiplexes has altered attitudes. “And so we have unconventional films, like Honeymoon