April 28, 2024

Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 (2024)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Bollywood, Review | Tags: , , , , , , , , |
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Whether one admires it or not, it is hard to deny that Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 is unlike anything being made in Mumbai right now. The array of trailers that preceded my screening of the film offers a good sample of where Bollywood is otherwise right now: Bhaiyya Ji (a Southern-inspired actioner), Srikanth (an underdog biopic) and The Sabarmati Report (a rabblerousing right-wing political drama), the latter produced by Balaji Motion Pictures, the same company that has issued Banerjee’s film. Like its 2010 predecessor, LSD 2 positions itself consciously at the margin of the industry, drawing its energies from both new media environments and independent filmmaking while at the same time profiting from the mechanisms of professional production and distribution.

The original LSD was a three-part morality play that probed the unsavoury intersection of salacious sex, burgeoning media and cheap digital image-making. The new film retains the structure and the stridency of the original, but goes further by removing the last remaining guardrails that assured us that there may be a way to steer clear of this impending dystopia. Expanding the earlier film’s scope to newer forms of mediation, LSD 2 informs us that we are now fully living in a technocratic nightmare and the only way out is further inside; that delulu is the only solulu.

The opening part of LSD 2 is set entirely inside a Big-Brother-like online reality TV show titled Truth Ya Naach (Truth or Dance), where viewers with smartphones can tune into the camera of any of the participants as well as bet on them in each episode. Participants, in turn, can choose to turn off their cameras at the risk of audience disengagement. At the end of each episode, one participant is eliminated by the panel of judges, played by Anu Malik, Sophie Choudry and Tusshar Kapoor. Banerjee amplifies the self-cannibalizing nature of this ecosystem by mixing show footage with viewer reactions to each episode in the form of vlogs, podcasts and memes.

The nominal protagonist of the section is Noor (Paritosh Tiwari), a transwoman participant whose ratings skyrocket once her estranged mother (Swaroopa Ghosh) is invited on to the show. However, a change in sponsors of Truth Ya Naach has meant that the show has to pivot to family friendly audiences, forcing the showrunners to evict Noor within the logic of the show. The show’s progressive veneer of inclusion makes way for mother sentiment, both thrown out once they are milked to their limits. Within this totalizing simulacrum, the mother’s sceptical outsider perspective is first presented as a point of identification for us, the viewers of the film who are invited to look at everything on display with contempt, but it is jettisoned when mother herself internalizes the rules of the game.

This kind of narrative rug pulling continues in the second (and possibly the weakest) segment of the film, albeit on a less ironic and more realistic register. Kullu (Bonita Rajpurohit), a transgirl working as a janitor at the metro station, is assaulted in a park. Kullu’s boss Lovina (Swastika Mukherjee) helps her file a case, but when compromising details emerge from the police investigation, she finds a PR disaster on her hands. No more a perfect victim, Kullu is a timebomb for the company whether she withdraws the case or pursues it, and Lovina, like the showrunners of Truth Ya Naach, is forced to orchestrate Kullu’s exit by other means. Unfolding through video calls and Zoom conferences, this segment immerses us into the disintegrating mind of Lovina, a single mother whose motives are obscured by her constant frustrations. Things are further complicated with the introduction of other plot elements, such as a housing crisis and an extra-marital affair.

But the film really piles it on in the third segment. An influencer named Game Paapi (Abhinav Singh) is on the verge of internet legend when doctored sex pictures of him are leaked during a live stream by a bad actor. As a reputation management firm tries to put a positive spin on this, Game Paapi himself takes flight in shame and denial, rejecting the iniquities of the real world to establish a cult in the metaverse. Or something. A ChatGPT-level rehash of half-informed boomer techno-prophesies, this section throws in everything you’ve heard about the dangers of artificial intelligence and cyberbullying and then some. Things veer further into incomprehensibility thanks to some aggressive mumbling by the actors, esoteric internet speak and a good dose of enthusiastic censorship.

Each segment of the film is inspired by a specific video medium — live television, video conference and webcasting respectively — and the colours, editing, camera movement, the choice of lenses and the production design are all determined in accordance with these devices. Banerjee’s impressive attention to the specific visual texture and syntax of each medium is superseded only by his incredible ear for language and speech patterns. The third section performs an accelerationist sensory assault, employing a bone-rattling synthesis of webcam footage, recreated memes, AI-generated poop, cable news blight and some queasy-making animation. The film’s sound, on the other hand, is uniformly dull, dousing all the amateur visual spice in a professionally mixed sonic soup.

Throughout, Banerjee takes pains to remind us that everything we are seeing is mediated by a camera with a vested interest. To this end, he even uses points-of-view shots in sequences where a diegetic camera is absent — a blunt tactic normalized half way into the film. LSD 2 foregrounds the inescapability of these media environments, moving from traditional television’s self-rejuvenating search for total reality to Web 3.0’s rejection of reality in favour of an alternate, synthetic universe. This absolute, conspiratorial conception is offset by characteristically dry humour, such as the sight of Game Paapi’s mother bringing lunch to the desk of her YouTuber son, or Noor’s mother on Truth Ya Naach belting out a number titled “Gandi Taal” (Dirty Beat) with the decorum of a ghazal singer.

One of the most striking things about LSD 2 is how unprovocative it is despite handling sensational material and hot-button issues. (As an aside, this film is a good example of how to cinematically engage with bigotry and discrimination without recreating it in the name of realism.) Banerjee is not a provocateur, but a moralist at heart, and for all its bleak cynicism and psychological murkiness, the film is remarkably single-minded in its critique. LSD 2 puts its finger on a historical moment when public-facing corporate capitalism, social movements around marginalized sexual identities and a rapidly changing media landscape run up against two-faced middle-class values. Each of these forces is now an ally, now an enemy to the other, each one interacting with the other with a view to self-perpetuate. It is pertinent that the film ends with an interview between a traditional television anchor and a multiverse personality, both connected to pliant viewers on one end and corporate sponsors on the other. In LSD 2, you can check out of late capitalism any time you like, but you can never leave.

 

March 20, 2010

Band Of Insiders

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Review | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Love, Sex Aur Dhokha

Through The Rear Window 
(Image courtesy: BigOye.com)

Let’s not make wrong assumptions. Dibakar Banerjee’s Love, Sex Aur Dhokha (2010) is not an experimental film, although it is considerably avant-garde in comparison to the existing norms of Bollywood, with its premise, non-professional casting, sound design and somewhat non-conformist grammar. The promos may have given one the idea that it is a film that works in ultra-Brechtian mode. Far from that, the film doesn’t ever breach the fourth wall, thanks to its choice of making the film appear entirely subjective (It actually isn’t as is revealed by certain shots). Another misconception the promotional ads might have given birth to is that Banerjee’s film is highly agenda-driven. This was my biggest fear too, that Banerjee might be presenting an extended, dressed-up message pertaining to mass media and reality TV.  Thankfully, not considering its minor flights into Madhur Bhandarkar-ness, the film eschews making any overt statement and lets the implication of its choices speak for itself. Banerjee uses a number of clever and not-so-clever tricks to make the film straddle the zones of populist and experimental cinema, the brilliant and the banal and art and entertainment. But, perhaps, the best part about the whole venture is that it stands witness to the fact that it isn’t just because of the star or studio system that our cinema is in such a poor shape. And that good cinema can well be produced under shoestring budgets.

Love, Sex Aur Dhokha presents three stories, running for about 40 minutes each, each of which is introduced by an apt B-movie title, suggesting the highly fictional and staged nature of the segments to follow. Indeed, each of the three stories amounts to some form of performance or the other. The first segment gives us a student filmmaker, Rahul (Anshuman Jha), who idolizes Aditya Chopra and is trying to complete his diploma film that takes off from his mentor’s much loved Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995). The second part tells the story of a retail store manager, ironically named Adarsh (Raj Kumar Yadav), who is terribly pressed for money and plans to break through, not without much hesitation, by rigging up a sex scandal. And the third section gives us a television reporter, Prabhat (Amit Sial), and his aide, whom he saves from suicide, trying to blow the cover of a vulgar pop-star by setting up a sting operation. Banerjee uses the oldest trick of the new millennium to tie the three disparate stories together, using overlapping narratives and intersecting references and conversations, whose artificiality shows up at a few places, but not so much as to make the choice seem completely inorganic. In all three segments, there is at least one diegetic camera recording all the events – of Rahul’s professional camera, the CCTC cameras and Prabhat’s spy-cam – whose footage Banerjee splices and slices to form a seamless narrative.

The first segment, at first glance, seems cut off thematically from the other two. However, gradually, it reveals itself as a gateway to the other two segments, which starkly diverge from the idea the first one presents. Rahul, like the bumbling duo of Ishqiya (2010), does not understand the difference between life and art. He believes that life can proceed the same way as one of his mentor’s movies. He tries to port Bollywood culture on to his life – scribbling his beloved’s name on trees, eloping with friends’ help a la Saathiya (2002) and making late night phone calls to surprise his sweetheart. One even wonders if his real name is Rahul or if it is another one of his lame attempts at merging life with pop art. In other words, he does not realize that his life is the exact negation of the film he is making. A cut from the smiling face of Shruti within the film gives way to the image of her crying in reality. A scene in Rahul’s film is interrupted by a similar incident happening in real life. Shruti’s father turns out to be far from the generous father in his film. Rahul films his life 24×7, in order to send it to his idol some day, with a belief that it is as fairytale-like as the films he likes (there is even a kiss scene in this section that is severed from the frame in a manner characteristic of Bollywood). Rahul, eventually, pays the price for not understanding the vast chasm that exists between reality and its popular representation, an instance of which he is creating as his diploma project (I don’t understand why Banerjee feels the need to exaggerate the film within the film so much to emphasize this dichotomy. Comic relief, maybe).

[LSD Trailer]

Having established the disjunction between truth and its representation, Banerjee’s film attempts to explore the ethics of representation in the second segment of the film. Banerjee bases this part of the film fittingly in a supermarket – the temple of commodification and commerce. Characters, especially the two women in this segment, are almost always filmed standing amidst aisles filled with FMCG products, wearing clothing that is as colourful as the products themselves. One person in the mall tells us how commercially profitable the CCTV is, citing the hefty amount of money that the footage of a shootout brought. Welcome to the world of consumer capitalism, where violence and sex are commodities to be proliferated, packaged, advertised and sold. The moral conflict that Adarsh is presented with, when he has the option of switching off the CCTV system, is the quintessential moral question underlying capitalism – just how far will you go? In fact, the target is capitalism in all three segments of the film. Only that it is indicted through its powerful agents – mass media and Bollywood. Adarsh himself is a more polished and less addicted version of Rahul in the way he is unable to comprehend the difference between reality and its representation (and, hence perhaps, the gravity and possible consequences of his moral choice). In a cheeky homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964), Adarsh gloriously “performs”, in true Bollywood fashion, a fake death stunt while he frets when an actual shootout follows. The sex scene itself is filmed head on and plays out between the storeroom shelf and a curtain suggestive of a theatrical performance.

Following this segment on the ethics of representation, Banerjee takes up the tautological (and Godardian) question of representation of ethics. This third section of the film, which deals with a sting operation performed by a private news network, is, on paper, the richest segment of the film for it’s the most morally ambiguous of the three. Morally ambiguous because, unlike the other two segments, we just aren’t able to embrace any particular side or character here. The pop-star’s activities may be highly questionable and even downright immoral, but so are the methods of the news network. Each character in this segment is prostituting himself/herself in one way or the other (Of course, here too, the punching bag is capitalism). Only that the news network, the self-proclaimed keeper of truth and justice, seems licensed to do it. More than acting as a medium of announcement, this news network, as in reality, likes to work as a moral police, telling its people what is ethically right, what is wrong, when to be enraged at someone and when to cheer for some lame event. There is apparently no difference between what the news network editor does and what Adarsh does. However, there is a ray of hope that is presented in this segment in the form of (again, the aptly named) Prabhat, the least unethical person in the film and the alter ego of the director himself perhaps, who refuses to hand over any of the footage that he has shot, sacrificing fame and money for integrity.

Of course, Banerjee’s film isn’t as consistent and ambitious in presenting us with such moral ambiguity. The characters in the first two segments are mostly black and white and we are told beforehand whom to root for and whom to curse. But as such, the film has a set of ethics (evident from its editing pattern), close to that of Prabhat’s, which it staunchly adheres to, even to the point of flaunting it. The possibly sensational sex scene is dimly lit and choreographed at a considerable distance from the camera that it is completely de-eroticized. So is the case with the murder in the first segment. In all three segments, reality is manipulated to a large extent for the sake of representation – Rahul’s film, the MMS clip and the sting operation footage – with a profit motive. Although the titular love, sex and betrayal form the prime motifs in the first, second and third segments respectively, it is clear that all three elements run though all the three sections of the film in a manner that betrays much cynicism about cinema. This cynicism towards such an important medium by a filmmaker is certainly off-putting until Banerjee presents the warm epilogue to the film, where a young girl wields the camera and charmingly interviews the various characters of the film. Yes, Banerjee does seem to recognize the power of cinema in preserving life’s most precious and fleeting moments, to convert them into art and preserve them for eternity.

 

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