While the new film doesn’t draw us emotionally close to its world like the first LSD iteration did, the auteur spellbinds us nevertheless with his vision and audacity
Dibakar Banerjee loves to tell stories of misfits and rebels of contemporary India. His debut feature Khosla Ka Ghosla! (2006; written by Jaideep Sahni) could be seen as a whimsical portrayal of a power struggle in urban India which unfolds through a motley crew staging a coup against a tyrant. Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008) captures the outlier in a seasoned thief who outwits the world on his own affable terms whereas Shanghai (2012), the political thriller, recognises the moral decay of our society with the help of a range of characters.
Even Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! (2015), his only period film to date, wholeheartedly accepts that its titular protagonist is a bit of an oddball before confirming that he is a genius detective nevertheless.
His 2010 film Love, Sex Aur Dhokha, and now its 2024 sequel LSD 2, then become the perfect and most ideal manifestations of his queer view of the world. Both films place three interconnected stories and their respective protagonists in the purview of radical technology while the country’s sociality guides each of their fates.
Love Sex Aur Dhokha was a startling film when it came out and it remains so to date because it embraced voyeurism — amateur film cameras, CCTVs, spy cameras — as a great tool to understand everyday evil. The ethos stays exactly the same fourteen years later and here, too, we get three riveting stories of love, sex and dhokha but unlike the previous iteration, we are not dealing with anything intrusive or stealthy like found footage — in 2024, the eye of the camera is omnipresent and accepted as a necessity to face life.
A sense of palpable chaos
Take Noor (Paritosh Tiwari), the trans woman who is striving really hard to win the quirky and equally diabolical reality show named ‘Truth ya Naach’. It’s a bit of an odd name for a show but as we hear it being mouthed repeatedly by the characters, it becomes clear that it’s an extremely intelligent wordplay on ‘ch*tiya naach’.
The show and its format certainly live up to this sly drollery because Noor is not only a dancer but also a contestant on a Bigg Boss-like show wherein she is forced to reveal her personal and feral sides for the sake of a score that the Indian janta awards contestants, as it consumes the drama through salacious live streaming.
Banerjee renders this particular segment as part farce and part social commentary in that he and his writers (Shubham and Prateek Vats) trace Noor’s struggle to find acceptance as a transitioning woman while the showrunners, fronted by host Mouni Roy and judges Anu Malik (as Prem Desi), Sophie Choudhary and Tusshar Kapoor, attempt to exploit the same struggle by bringing her displeased mother on to the show. Everything about Noor and her life is up for sale because she believes the entire world must approve of her during this rite of passage.
Cohesion or clarity has never been Banerjee’s priority as a filmmaker and he intentionally muddles up the narrative here to create palpable chaos. It’s to almost reveal the state of mind of characters who are in despair and confusion and the second segment of LSD 2 carries this duality with flair. Lovina Singh (Swastika Mukherjee) leads a special scheme in Delhi Metro which empowers and employs trans women and when one of the employees, Kullu (Bonita Rajpurohit), is raped and beaten up, she chooses to fight for her justice.
Things, though, get murky because it is suggested that Kullu might have withheld a few details about the incident and Lovina’s view of the whole ordeal changes because of a few inconveniences. Banerjee and his writers deftly bring sexual politics in modern India to the fore through Lovina’s confiscation of Kullu’s autonomy; the power and elitism subtly wielded by middle-class India are underlined beautifully in this tale, which refrains from overpronouncing its intent.
Real vs Virtual
All three segments, just as in the 2010 film, overlap through thin threads and LSD 2 really comes together when the third and final segment gets going. It is here that the auteur dazzles us and reveals just how deep he digs into the psyche of the current world of social media influencers and their masochistic approach to validation. The third segment ends up being my personal favourite of the lot because unlike in the other two, Banerjee focuses entirely on one character and charts the story of Shubham (Abhinav Singh), aka Game Pappi, with tremendous empathy.
Game Pappi is 18 years old, still in school and streams warfare games to millions of subscribers. He is the cream of the crop as far as the influencer game is concerned but his unprecedented fame is countered by a faceless nemesis named Fullmoon. Here, too, sexuality becomes a subtextual topic but the narrative never forgets its quest to understand identity and individuality in the current crowded world.
Game Pappi, caught in a sex scandal of sorts, says, “yeh main nahi hun (this is not me)” during his live feed and the hook line soon becomes a meme among teens in India, just as it translates into a muffled cry for help from the boy himself. Ultimately, we see how his destiny leads him to spiral out of the plane of reality and find solace in a virtual world, where life is fortunately interpreted or projected as he pleases.
Watching LSD 2 is like recalling a dream or a nightmare vividly. The film masterfully jumps in and out of layers and draws a really thin line between what’s real and what’s virtual, between what’s sane and what’s warped to finally make us pose more questions to ourselves. Banerjee though comes off as an overthinking alarmist at times given that he has very little to nothing encouraging or nice to say about the digital age and consequently, the sum isn’t greater than its parts.
But what really works is that the filmmaker in him takes no half measures and he is unrelenting as ever. He demands our complete attention because he wants to shock us albeit with self-indulgence getting in the way. Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 is dense with visual cues; it ensures that he doesn’t go fully overboard with his indulgence. Unlike LSD, this new film is impersonal with its tone in that the characters and their tragedies are kept at a distance from us by design. And yet, it leaves a profound impact that very few films manage to do.
