REVIEW: Love Sex aur Dhokha (2)

CONSUME WITH CAUTION

Dibakar Banerjee’s third film, Love Sex Aur Dhokha, a.k.a. LSD, is, in many ways as inventive as Khosla Ka Ghosla and Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye. Cannily shot and superbly acted by a bunch of newcomers, this film deserves to be seen by a society that’s mindlessly accepting digital images through various media, without understanding the implications of its voyeurism. Irony is, LSD too may end up becoming a just vehicle of titillation instead of invoking revulsion, as I presume, the director intends it to, if the audience doesn’t receive it with sensitivity.

A take-off on Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge gone awry

There’s nothing pretty about this picture and it’s entirely on purpose. Shot on a digital format and carefully designed to seem like tacky home video, CCTV or spy cam footage, while still looking aesthetic, LSD is pitch-perfect in the craft department. The interconnections between the three stories woven together to depict Love, Sex and Dhokha, seem forced, but at least two of them stand well on their own.

The first film-within-film is the diary of an amateur filmmaker. It’s the least effective of the three themes and lacklustre in terms of plot and characterisation. An obvious spoof on Bollywood and the unrealistic fantasies it fuels, here’s a young film school student whose only ambition in life is to remake Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. It’s the kind of film that’s fairly easy to ridicule, yet very difficult to parody and hence the segment falls flat, more so because the characters who play out the grim satire themselves are uninteresting.

The second story has more merit, and a murkier atmosphere. It’s set in a supermarket and shot through the eye of CCTV cameras around the store. A young salesgirl gets lured by a shady co-worker into a sexual encounter that’s caught on tape and sold for cash. Here, both Adarsh and Rashmi, the young couple, are more humane and the horror of what ensues much more real. He’s a ‘MBA-type’, who hasn’t made it and is hounded by loan sharks, she, a girl of average looks who seems conscious of her ordinariness and craves acceptance. Both Adarsh and Rashmi could have chosen differently, but don’t.

The best episode is the third, a sting operation involving a small-town girl, Mrignayana, aspiring to become an item dancer and a sleazy pop star Luki Local (the film’s finest performance by someone called Herry Tangri). The other element of this segment is a morose television journalist Prabhat, in search of a saleable story. The wannabe showgirl teams up with the journalist and together they trap the singer into a scandal, the kind that routinely unfolds on primetime television in the name of breaking news and is evidently devoured with relish. The callousness of the media boss, albeit exaggerated in treatment, doesn’t seem far from the truth either.

But the one serious question LSD throws up is—can a filmmaker exploit the very societal stereotypes he’s trying to critique through his film to further his point, and then hope that the same audience that gleefully receives such images will, instead, get repulsed this time round? Or is he as liable as anyone else who objectifies women and peddles sleaze for profit? Banerjee’s film deserves applause for exploring a new form of story telling and perhaps, a little reservedly, for his noble intention of sounding a wake-up calls to a lost generation.