The director, whose Netlfix film ‘Tees’ has been shelved, on the manic bizarreness of Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2, and how its making resembles the way dreams, nightmares work inside us
Dibakar Banerjee’s curiosities often stir up emotions in his viewers, either enchanting them or enraging them, or sometimes causing a bit of both. Despite being a marquee name in the Hindi film industry with cult classics like Khosla Ka Ghosla! (2006), Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008) and Love Sex Aur Dhokha (2010) in his repertoire, the filmmaker in him refuses to take it easy and instead has largely gravitated towards creative risks and precarity. His most ambitious film to date, Tees, stands as a testament to this as Banerjee attempts to trace the life and times of a middle-class Indian Muslim family over a sprawling period of five decades. Tees, a Netflix original, has been shelved by the streamer for the film’s supposed sensitive topic. He is said to have completed shooting the film in 2022.
But Banerjee, 54, remains undeterred, at least on the outside, and he returned to the cinemas recently with Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 or LSD 2. The spiritual sequel to LSD is another triptych that takes stock of human dynamics with present-day technology and how the mores of social media condition us all into a new realm of living and loving. We have got reality show contestants, online gamers, streamers, vloggers and the whole gamut of interesting and intriguing characters at the centre of this world, wherein the camera (just as in the 2010 film) remains an omnipresent tool albeit with more far-reaching powers and implications.
The Federal spoke to the filmmaker about making this unusual film, the self-confessed bizarreness behind its making, Tees, Detective Byomkesh Bakshy 2 — sequel to the 2015 detective movie starring late Sushant Singh Rajput in the lead — and, of course, the state of affairs in our country. Edited excerpts:
You were quoted as saying in a recent interview that Tees is your best film. Did you actually say that? If so, why?
I did say that, but I said that it’s my best film to date. That said, I will get a handle on how LSD 2 is in about a year’s time from now. What happens is that, personally, I end up liking the last film I made because I feel I have gone a step beyond the previous film.
What makes LSD 2 the current favourite then?
It’s the sheer abandoning of all caution and simply stepping into it (the film) with a kind of suicidal rush — something that I have never tried before. I think that emotion is captured in LSD 2. It literally felt like jumping into a black void and not knowing what would happen.
I suppose that’s a good segue into discussing the tone or the energy of the film. One of the first things I gathered after watching it is that this is arguably your most chaotic and intentionally incohesive film, almost as though you are trying to capture a state of mind. Is that a fair assessment?
Actually, this is one of the most tightly wound films of all, where the three stories are connected through quite a grizzly and scary incident. You have three characters, three stories and three destinies which are tied together by one traumatic incident. It’s the execution of these stories, which are happening on three different planes of our lives — our physical life, our passive-watching life and our active virtual life — that sets it apart from the rest. It’s like three layers and you keep giving up, jumping out and entering into, into and into. So cohesion, there is. But like any dream or a nightmare, the cohesion is subconscious. The focus-group screenings (which were done prior to the release on April 19) revealed that those who received the film well would go on to ask questions about the characters because everything is playing in their (the audience’s) heads.
Would it be fair to say that you are trying to be in the viewer’s face and be a little aggressive about what you are saying?
I don’t know about my aggression but the characters in the film are certainly going through struggles, aggression, counter-aggression, etc. And it’s not just the visuals and the words (that are aggressive). I have just made a film where I have thrown in every trick in the book. There are sequences that are not shot by a camera but created by artificial intelligence, there are characters who are born out of deep-fake and there are people who are going about life in the metaverse. In fact, a part of the story is playing out inside the metaverse. On top of that, there’s gaming, live-streaming, vlogging, there’s a reality show and we have also gone on to shoot our own memes!
Well, that means you seem pretty well-equipped to become an influencer yourself.
(Laughs). I think after making LSD 2, the only thing I am sure about is that my decision to stay away from social media was the correct one. I crawled and snooped into the world and looked at it objectively, but I will definitely not be making (social media) videos or anything like that.
You used the term ‘pagalpanti’ recently in an interview, suggesting that collectively we are being conquered by some kind of madness. That compels me to compare LSD 2 with Shanghai of all films — both films, separated from one another by the milieu, talk about moral decay, don’t they? Shanghai was about the political bigwigs and now it’s the everyday.
Hmmm. Not really. The difference between Shanghai and LSD 2, and I have said this before, is that the maker is a little closer to insanity this time around. And what is insanity? It is the parallel co-existence of multiple planes of reality. This means I could be living in the day in this moment and it could become the night in the next moment. It’s a very basic, banal example but that’s what I mean by insanity.
And does that insanity reside in your head alone? Or does it also stem from the world that surrounds you?
It’s both. Somebody existing on multiple planes of reality at the same time cannot be commenting on moral decay because that person would be traversing five or more sets of rules and morals. That is to say that I am not talking about moral decay but what’s changed, over the last five or six years, is that the sadistic or the cruel part of me has come up more prominently. That’s why you see in LSD 2 that there’s a certain enjoyment and revelry in the chaos.
So does that mean that you are empathetic towards your characters in the film? Not sympathetic but empathetic.
Absolutely and they do some horrible things in the film. But I am enjoying it when they do those horrible things. That said, while I am trying to understand where a Noor, a Kullu or a Game Pappi is coming from, I don’t have a bleeding heart to say, “Dekho, what happened to this poor person.” It’s definitely not that approach.
What was the process of making LSD 2 like?
I feel that the film and the process of making the film became one. I went through so much madness, bizarreness and so many unbelievable moments during the making that the film started to collect that feeling. Imagine making a film wherein you are on a video call and you are telling someone to jump off a hill with a paragliding suit and start screaming from the seventh second of your jump. And somebody shooting that fall and sending it later to me so that I can use it in my film. So, the construction of the film is also like how dreams and nightmares work inside you.
In fact, Sneha (Khanwalkar) and I spent six months perfecting a song but none of the singers, whom the music company wanted, were able to sing because it was a bit too risqué for them and they were afraid of being trolled. Because of that, we had to change the song and because we had to change the song, we had to change the scene! And then, because of the corporate insanity of music companies and production houses, the contractual-legal details and so on, that song was never put in the film. Sneha and I were fighting till the end for the song but we were prevented — in the end, we used a track that has no words but whose music sounds like it does.
This film aside, I remember you said many years ago that India isn’t still at a stage where a really personal film like Last Tango in Paris (1972) could be made. You meant a film removed from the social purview cannot be widely accepted. Have you come closer to accepting and making personal stories today?
No, I think we have walked away from it further because we have all our hopes on the star, on the human God, the celebrity or the one all-important influencer/sportsperson. I think the consequence of constantly looking up to that human God/star/celebrity has isolated us while we are part of a screaming crowd at the same time. I mean, we are rabal now and even the climax of LSD 2 signatures the birth of a new God (laughs). We are even further away (from giving importance to personal stories) because we are getting into a state where we are a crowd with our eyes fixed on one demigod and are walking towards the edge of a cliff and jumping off.
Would you say you have moved away from wanting to tell personal tales? A film about two lovers, for instance.
I think what you mean is a personal canvas when you mean a personal film. And Tees is that.
Okay, I cannot let you go without asking you about Detective Byomkesh Bakshy 2. What can we expect on that front?
As soon as I get somebody interested in putting money behind it, Byomkesh Bakshy 2 will become a reality. The thing is that we are already on that route but I can’t reveal much.
But one supposes you have to change things up quite a bit for the sequel, right? The first instalment had an open-ended climax.
Well, the funny thing is my plan was always to make the next Byomkesh with another actor. I miss Sushant, of course. But the plan has been to keep changing the Byomkeshs with every film because of the character’s ability to evolve. Nobody stays constant. Detective Byomkesh Bakshy was his first case — he was 24-25 years old — so, now shall we see a more mature Byomkesh?
