The only thing I knew about Dibakar Banerjee’s Love, Sex aur Dhokha is that it originally had a five-minute sex scene which the CBFC cut to half. The last Hindi movie that I watched in a theater was Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D. I was mostly disappointed by it, mainly because I fail to understand the greatness of Devdas. What struck me about Dev D then and LSD now is the increasing sexual liberation that mainstream Bollywood is witnessing. It is nowhere close to accepting sex as an integral part of life (as in Europe), but it is acknowledging its presence in the society, in youth, and on the Internet.
LSD is not doing as well as I wish it. On its eighth day, a Saturday second show screened on the biggest screen of a multiplex here was only half-filled. I wonder whether it is the unknown cast or the reality atmosphere that is putting off the crowds. If it is the word of mouth about the “adultness”, it is a pity for it has nothing more shocking than is shown round the clock on various Indian news and reality TV shows.
The movie opens without titles, with a promise that the viewers will be treated to three raunchy movies for just one movie ticket (though popcorn doesn’t really fit here), and it takes us on an unabashed tour of sensationalism. The three “movies” tightly share their themes and are loosely interconnected in the way many well-known non-Indian movies are (e.g. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, Paul Haggis’ Crash, Stephen Daldry’s The Hours, and Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic). I don’t intend to draw too much attention to this novelty, but it has been executed carefully here and I would like to see whether and how Indian Cinema milks it.
In the first movie, a young lad and a lass studying in a film institute fall in love while he directs a movie for his diploma certificate in which she plays the heroine. She is rich and he is street-smart, but together they are only fools for love. They reminded me of Sam Mendes’ American Beauty (creepy Ricky Fitts with a camera in hand) and Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces (director and ingénue). Why the scholarship-sponsored young director would make such a clichéd and terribly-acted movie is beyond me (he prays director Adityji), but its production gave Dibakar the opportunity to throw many stones at today’s state of Bollywood and more on reality TV. The entire movie is shown through a camera spitting out the timestamp, aspect ratio, battery charge, and lighting, and I was initially curious why Dibakar chose to include them. He may have been drawing our attention to the fact that the characters outside the young lad’s movie act as dramatically (reality ishtyle) as those inside it. It is a distraction. It could be my inexperience with watching reality TV. During the first married night of the protagonists, I found myself wondering whether the shot would be cut because the camera only had two minutes of charge left.
Voyeuristic hidden camera scandals are apparently all the rage in India, and Indians find the grainy videos more orgasmic than autoerotic asphyxiation. I am amused by the amount of research that must have gone into making the second movie, which revolves around an unemployed loser’s attempts to make a titillating video using the CCTV cameras in a supermarket. He desperately needs the money, and his conscience can turn around and on and off like the cameras that he controls (and sometimes doesn’t). After one beautiful caricature of a salesgirl calls his bluff, he digs his way towards another salesgirl with low self-esteem. He respects and likes her, gets attracted to her, tries to possess her, and she falls for him. The characters and their story are more developed than in the previous movie, but they mostly continue to act, especially talk, the way people do on reality TV, as if they are aware of the camera and the roles that it entails for them. Random thought: would a man jerk off on the night that he witnesses a gun shooting?
In the third movie, a cameraman who was once involved in prestigious sting operations, finds a candidate for a sex “sting of the century” which is all that his new employer wants from him (thanks to TRP ratings and a beautiful award on her table). The candidate was abandoned by the topmost album singer for a Russian (could have been an Ukrainian) who was quicker on her knees. The scorned woman wants revenge after surviving a suicide attempt (like the cameraman). The cameraman and the woman try to execute the sting operation, sketched by his boss and her assistant, and enhanced by them. As the movie progresses, the camera recedes, and while I welcomed it, it also distracted me too much just the way head-hopping and POV transitions within a paragraph distract readers. I am mostly ignorant about camera positions, but here I started feeling that it interfered with the story.
While the three movies seem to be centered around love, sex and betrayal respectively, each of them have all three elements as their central themes. The most enchanting aspect of LSD is the set of progressions from one movie to the next: the receding camera awareness, the increasing camera importance, the thickening plots, the deepening characters, the increasing casualness of sex, the decreasing crime, … I tip my hat to Dibakar Banerjee.
Image Source: Wikipedia
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