Filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee cannot help but laugh after being asked about his headspace when he began work on Love, Sex Aur Dhokha 2 (LSD 2). It’s hard to miss the anger in it, some of which has curdled into mirth.
Banerjee’s film Tees, about three generations of a Muslim family – which was commissioned by Netflix – was abandoned after completion. This is not the first project to have spooked the streaming platform, given that it was only recently battling the release of Sidharth P. Malhotra’s Maharaj, and was in news last year for taking down Nayanthara-starrer, Annapoorani.
“It’s impossible to not feel enraged,” recounts Banerjee during a video call, “It was a pretty – how should I put it – orthodox reaction.”
Some of the rage seems to have spilled over to his next – a spiritual sequel to the most profitable film of Banerjee’s career.
Love, Sex Aur Dhokha (2010) looked under the carpet of a country with an archaic sensibility, slowly coming to terms with the digital revolution. Made on a budget of Rs 2 crore, the film went on to earn nearly Rs 10 crores, and is one of the most ambitious Hindi films since 2000. In LSD 2, Banerjee builds a similar narrative structure with three separate stories – the first follows a reality show where people earn points for broadcasting their lives in real time, the second is about a metro station hiring transpersons under a special government initiative, and the third is about a controversial influencer. All stories bleed into one another, and Banerjee pours himself into trying to understand a nation’s addiction with media consumption. In doing so, Banerjee and his team chances upon a society slowly devouring itself.
LSD 2 feels like a necessary jolt in the way it disrupts and reimagines the visual style of the contemporary Hindi film. A sequence follows a character into a school in a single, unbroken shot, which was meant to be a spin on a third-person shooter game the character’s son plays. There’s a Virtual Reality sequence in the film that is meant to provide as much of a glimpse into the future of filmmaking, as it is to be a cautionary tale. This is probably one of the most unsettling Hindi films to come out this year.
Already on a recce for his next film, Banerjee [hereafter identified as DB] and his writing partners – Prateek Vats [PV] and Shubham [S] (the director and writer respectively of the highly-acclaimed Eeb Allay Oo), spoke to The Wire. Breaking down key sequences, stylistic choices, performances, and their reading of a climate where filmmakers like them are being discouraged, the trio spoke at length about how they’re battling for survival on their own terms.
Edited excerpts are as follows.
Dibakar, I assume you began working on LSD 2 when you were making your peace with Tees being put on an indefinite hold. Were you carrying any of the residual anger into this one?
DB: I would suppose so. We carry what’s put on our backs, so to that extent I assume I was carrying whatever there was. I think we were objective about making the film. You can be objective about the making, but the film comes from a larger unconscious na? We were conscious about the making of it, but sure something unconscious must have seeped in.
Dibakar Banerjee on set. Photo: By arrangement.
Prateek and Shubham, what made you say yes to a sequel? What was the opportunity you spotted in it?
PV: Rarely do you get a commissioned project where you get to do whatever you want, right? There’s no pressure where we’re forced to write about ‘nice’ people, doing ‘nice’ things and finding redemption and all that. We’re all slightly fatigued after hearing that kind of feedback. So, it was a nice flash for the three of us, when it went around in the most uncensored manner possible. Just to be able to do that, we found a place to vent.
S: The initial discussion was very interesting. There’s usually a pressure that comes along with a commissioned project, which wasn’t here. We had to start afresh – from the ideation to the execution, including our ways of ‘seeing’, which was very exciting.
DB: What these two are being polite about and side-stepping is that I’d gone to them with three stories, two of which they weren’t excited about. So, we chucked them and started from scratch.
PV: See, this is what I mean! There were people actually listening to us.
What were your respective exposure to memes, metaverse and reality shows? What did research look like?
PV: If it’s for research purposes, then a lot. But the interesting thing about the Internet experience is how it’s tailor-made for you. Mine will be completely different from Shubham, whose experience will be different from Dibakar. They’re all like tapping into different worlds. It also helps you beat the algorithm sometimes, when you’re trying to diversify your preferences. So, two people searching for one thing are watching two entirely different things – it’s chaotic, and it also helps bounce off ideas.
DB: I’ve been thoroughly observing social media for the last decade or so. It’s just that I don’t use social media personally. I look at social media, how I look at local trains. I might not be riding them to work everyday. And it’s not for this film that I’ve been watching social media, it’s only that my expression has intensified with LSD 2.
S: I do waste a lot of time on it. And the nature of social media is such that even while being critical of it, you’re still scrolling. The whole architecture of social media is fascinating, where you can’t stop scrolling. Your thumb does it instinctively. And it doesn’t matter if you’re not there on Instagram or Twitter [now called X], we’ve become immune to people taking selfies around us, so you’re automatically a part of it even if you don’t want to be. You don’t have a choice anymore. The world around us has changed, and we’re all subliminally aware of.
What was the most surprising thing you chanced upon during research?
PV: Like Shubham was saying earlier, I think it has nothing to do with how many platforms you’re on. For me, the Internet is an entirely new beast in a country like India that offers such liberation. Weird discussions happening everywhere, TikTok suddenly becomes a political tool. The multiplicity of opinions here – how does one create a cohesive narrative around this? These are flowing airwaves right? So, how does one make something cohesive around a series of random choices made by people at any given moment. I think that was one of the early challenges we were excited about. It’s not usually how we write scripts, and it opened us up to a whole new side.
S: More than surprising, I think I reached a realisation during research. I remember when we began watching videos of influencers – I realised that there was a lot of emotional value in it for those invested. You often wonder how anyone can be so emotionally invested in such things, and that’s when you realise the gaps – of age, time. We’ve always seen social media a certain way – where it’s just a funny meme, or it’s a clip from Gunda (1998) that is going viral, or a clip from a reality show where a contestant is crying – and you’re laughing at it. But I realised that there’s a pretty significant chunk in society, who are deeply invested in this world, who can lay their lives down for their social media accounts. I also came to realise why it’s become such a potent political tool, because it’s very easy for you to be sitting in your room and get emotional about something you’ve just read or watched on social media. For me to say, this community is cheating you off resources you’re entitled to, is the easiest way to manipulate anyone.
A still from ‘LSD 2’.
For a generation, this is the only version of reality they’ve grown up with. I assume some of us have a certain distance from it…
PV: I think such an idea is a bit outdated – that it’s a version of reality. It is reality, it has real-world implications. Whether it’s about finances, careers or even with respect to public persona. Five-ten years ago, we would speak about how virtual reality will be a thing, AI will be here, and that time has come. Right now, we’re living in a mixture of realities, where we have a bit of everything. And as a result it’s probably confusing for youngsters growing up today, it is their reality. It’s very easy to become didactic about it – but there’s more happening here. And it needs to be examined more closely, with more curiosity. This has become a big way to construct narratives – it’s a weapon. Some people deploy it for financial gain, some do it for the everyday glamour, and some people will do it for political gains.
In the first story – I want to touch upon when you show the viewers ‘consuming’ the show. I suddenly felt conscious and guilty as a viewer of the movie, like you had turned the camera on me. Was that what you intended?
PV: Guilt is an easy, low-hanging emotion. Especially for the middle-class. I hope it prompts a bit more introspection. Guilt is a liberal emotion, but it gives us a way to hide our contradictions. I understand what you’re saying about how it made you feel guilty, but I don’t sympathise with it.
In the second story – the conversation between Lovina (Swastika Mukherjee) and Monty, felt like a conversation between the two halves of my brain, torn between approaching things emotionally or administratively. Did you feel that while writing it?
PV: A lot of it came from Dibakar’s conversations with his friends. But yes, I see what you’re saying. These are conversations one has with themselves: whether to act ‘emotionally’ or ‘administratively’. But it’s trying to distil that feeling into a line, and Shubham has a good knack for these things. It wasn’t the most time-efficient thing obviously, because all three of us were taking a stab at it, and we were deliberating on each and every word in that exchange. I think it worked out well in the end.
I love the character of Monty (played by Shubham) – there’s this deliberate matter-of-factness to him. He doesn’t hesitate while lying, being distant with his lover, a pragmatic, analytical side to him.
DB: For us, he was the ultimate mansplaining male. In our eyes, Monty doesn’t miss a single opportunity to remind Lovina that she’s in a position because of her own doing. There’s something wrong with her. He’s on a slightly higher pedestal when he’s talking to Lovina.
What do you think of Hindi films and OTT shows treating a queer character as garnish?
DB: I haven’t watched anything recently. But my unreleased film Tees, has a portion set in the future, in 2042. It had a transgender influencer toeing the line with the state. I had no inclination for the protagonist in the second story to be a transperson, until Prateek and Shubham wrote the story. And after that, I had no need to see it as anything other than a story about labour, feminism and exploitation. I think I only saw it as that.
PV: There’s obviously what you’re saying, but it will go away the more films we make with transgenders as principal characters. Films can be made sensitively, but there will be varying degrees in terms of execution. Some will land better, some characters will have more meat, but I also feel that the middle class needs to be shown more such stories. These stories where a transgender is hired as a staff at a metro station – so that the metro station looks better, and it has nothing to do with the upliftment of transpersons – are stories that the middle class needs to be told. It’s important we need to make more of these. Such topics are easily relegated to being ‘documentary subjects’. The audience usually watches gender as gender, caste as caste and class as class – while the three of us are more interested in their intersections. All we’re saying is that this is what we’re observing, and I think that’s why Kullu’s story needed that lens of a story about labour, and it needed to be set in a public-private partnership metro station – irrespective of their gender. I think if we do this then Kullu’s gender identity finds more assertion.
A still from LSD 2.
S: Continuing alongside what Prateek was saying – it’s incredibly easy to guilt-trip the middle class. We haven’t even been able to win battles for women, Dalits, Muslims; the transgenders are far off. Since the 70s, we see the portrayal of a Muslim chacha – who is very good at heart. The woman is a victim of rape, who will turn into a devi after her vengeance. The Dalit person will work hard and still not be able to overcome their obstacle. I think you take away a person’s dignity, if you concentrate everything into a single identity within them. If you can’t see a flawed version of them – something most ordinary people among us are allowed to live with – then it’s a disease within you. And that can only change once more films are made by transgender/queer filmmakers, more Dalit filmmakers because only then will you have a more nuanced discourse. Otherwise, we’ll keep seeing films that talk like “Oh look at that bichara queer person”, “Oh look at that bichara Dalit!” They’re not bicharas, it’s how you see them because of your ignorance. So, it was a deliberate decision to show Noor with all her complexities. Most of us are insecure, why wouldn’t she be?
PV: There’s this line in a poem, I think, which goes like – The worst thing we can do to a marginalised person is take away their violence from them. We often are guilty of these things.
A fellow critic described the film as a scream into the void. Would it be a fair way to characterise it?
DB: We scream into the void more often than we’d like to admit. To that extent, our unconsciousness is probably the void. All three of us would like to take credit for that, if we’re to speak in Bollywood promotional language: LSD 2 is the first Hindi film to feature the unconsciousness on screen. There’s this collective consciousness which is a character in the film, and I hope the audience like our gift for them!
PV: It might be a scream, yes, but not into the void. These are all very tangible things, whose consequences we’re seeing in the real world.
DB: I think it’s a scream in a crowded lobby. Or maybe even the parking.
A still from LSD 2.
Ahead of Joyland’s release in India last year, Saim Sadiq said something interesting about how India feels like it’s competing with Pakistan with regard to a conservative mindset towards artistic endeavours. How can young filmmakers rise above the widespread censorship of the current regime?
DB: They can’t rise above the government. They’re writers trying to survive, looking to earn Rs 30,000 per month. They can’t rise above anything. It’s for older writers, directors and producers to come together and say this is how we work. They’re the ones who have to show some spine.
PV: Saim is right, we’re exactly where they were at one point. Would Pakistan be in a place like this if they’d listened to their progressive poets, artists only a few decades back? Which is what sends a chill down my spine, when I see the same mistakes being repeated back home. It’s a critical phase right now, and I’m not saying merely for the next 5-6 years, I think the answer lies in continuing to make something that challenges the establishment. One film or filmmaker can’t stand up against this. Hopefully, the cynicism doesn’t set in to a point that we don’t make anything at all. That would be devastating. We might not be able to make the studio films like we want to, but let’s keep hoping. People often tell us how we should learn from Iran – and my counter-question to them is why do you want to be an Iran in the first place? Stop that from happening.
S: Just because all of us have our individual struggles, doesn’t mean our battles also have to be on an individual level. I know it sounds a bit bookish, but I think the time for individual battles is over. We have to come together and fight this. I’m not saying we have to get into each other’s lives for this, but when you see a robber entering someone’s home, at least set off the alarm. Don’t close your window and be wilfully ignorant. Everyone needs to understand this. If you act selfishly and ignore efforts to censor artistic voices, it will mean collective losses for everyone.
DB: The act of distancing oneself from controversy is a collective action by the industry. That’s what empowers troll armies, because they want to isolate you and that’s when you start doubting your own sanity. If the industry collectively speaks up for a certain person then the isolation doesn’t work. It’s the only way to fight this. I’ve only learned it in the last 4-5 years.
Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 is now streaming on Netflix.
