Even in one of his lesser films, Shanghai (2012), director Dibakar Banerjee orchestrates a moment of sublime chaos. The item number Imported Kamariya, which is inter-cut with the doctor’s (Prosenjit Chatterjee) speech, is about to end. As the doctor gets off stage, a tempo rams into him. The people around him are frightened, livid, and confused, but Banerjee cuts to the final moments of the item song where bureaucrats are clapping out of obligation, and the dispassionate applause drowns out the shrieks from the tragedy that just took place. I was reminded of this scene while watching the second segment of Banerjee’s latest directorial feature, Love Sex aur Dhokha 2 (LSD 2) when some people start screaming at each other around a grievously injured character, even as one of them casually keeps clicking pictures.
A sequel to his own 2010 film Love Sex aur Dhokha – which used the form of a found-footage film to examine the rot in a society that was coming to terms with the technology around them – fourteen years later, Banerjee uses the same conceit to cast an eye on a society that forgot to log out. If LSD 2 is to be believed, our entire existence today is a performance. It needn’t merely be a camera nearby, but also the people surrounding us. Our behaviour changes depending on what we want next, and our ‘true’ selves come out behind closed doors. At one point, a TV executive points out how the ‘best’ moments in a character’s life are “off-cam” – especially in a reality show where the more you put yourself out there, the more validation you stand to gain.
Banerjee, and co-writers Prateek Vats and Shubham (who were behind 2019’s Eeb Allay Oo!), draw up three stories about people playing the perception game. There’s Noor (Paritosh Tiwari) taking part in a reality show that feels like a hybrid of everything that exists out there – Bigg Boss, Roadies, Splitsvilla, Jhalak Dikhla Jaa, Indian Idol etc. There’s Lovina (Swastika Mukherjee) – a mid-level bureaucrat whose empathy leaves the room when she realises how her ‘noble’ undertaking is even slightly tainted. And finally, there’s a YouTuber called Shubham who talks like it costs nothing during his live streams, gaining him nearly 6 million followers.
If Banerjee’s sly observations usually take the form of a scalpel in his other films, LSD 2 is a machete. He has no patience or curiosity for what lies underneath. He already knows, and it’s not pretty. The second story “Sex” casts trans actor Bonita Rajpurohit in the part of Kulu – a ‘diversity hire’ to showcase a company’s social responsibility. Rajpurohit is excellent in a scene when she’s simultaneously pleading, requesting, demanding and threatening Lovina to let her come back to work, merely days after she was raped. It’s the kind of economy we expect from a Dibakar Banerjee film.
Noor, trying to win a reality show contest, makes use of her estranged mother to gain sympathy from audiences. She deploys a strategic kiss, which makes a judge (played by Anu Malik) stand up and say something that will soon be given an unfortunate spin in memes. There’s a hilarious scene in the third story, where a principal tells her student that it’s okay if he’s “different” – after a few controversial photos go viral, as the boy keeps insisting he’s not “different” – implying he isn’t gay.
LSD2 is an unsparing assault on the senses that doesn’t believe in holding back. After all, its director has only recently made a film (Teen) which will not see the light of the day. He was also witness to the all-out ugliness that took place after his lead actor (of Detective Byomkesh Bakshy, 2014) killed himself. With his latest film – Banerjee feels like he’s in the mood to give back. Which explains his fixation with the word gandi (dirty). Maybe, there’s no salvation – and we’ll implode caressing our egos in dark rooms, with our faces to stare at on the screen in front of us.
