Hate mail to the Internet
Dibakar Banerjee trawls the seamy, cynical underbelly of cyberspace and nds more seaminess and cynicism. LSD 2 — a conceptual sequel to his 2010 thriller Love Sex Aur Dhokha — is a puzzling, grotesque, desperately bitter take on technology and cringe culture. Banerjee has, for years, been one of our keenest satirists, his darkly contoured lms verging on observational comedy. But LSD 2 nds him at the end of his patience, like someone sending angry and undigested hate mail.
Like the rst lm, LSD 2 presents a triptych of stories, chaptered ‘Like’, ‘Share’ and ‘Download’. In the rst segment, transwoman Noor (Paritosh Tiwari) is a contestant on a Bigg Boss-like reality show. When Noor’s estranged mother (Swaroopa Ghosh) enters the farce mid-season, the hunt for approval ratings gets hilariously bizarre. The second story follows Kullu (Bonita Rajpurohit), a transgender janitor at a Delhi metro station, in the aftermath of sexual assault. Finally, we wind up with Shubham (Abhinav Singh), an 18-year-old gamer on the brink of inuencer superstardom.
It promptly becomes clear how Banerjee — co-writing with Pratik Vats and Shubham — views the Internet subcultures of today: as a cesspit of pretence and instant grati cation, and people’s identities commodi ed, fetishised. The vitriol ows in every direction, from the performative social justice allyship of private rms to the aky creator economy percolating through middle India, complicit in its own oppression.
Banerjee takes on a lot, from transphobia to cyberbullying to big tech mind control, and the muddle of ideas and avenues leaves the lm an inchoate mess.
The 2010 original broke ground in digital cinematography in India, simulating the grainy ubiquity of hand-held camcorders, CCTV footage and spy cameras. The operative word in found footage cinema is ‘found’, a sense of surreptitious discovery missing in LSD 2.
The lm’s visual invention, instead, lies in Tiya Tejpal’s production design, which works in surreal details in the background. The young actors are all memorable, especially Abhinav Singh as the streamer Game Pappi.
In a recent podcast, Banerjee jokingly referred to himself as a “hectoring professor and biblical prophet rolled into one.” His alarmist doomsaying is not out of place. The director’s last lm, Tees, about three generations of an Indian Muslim family, was shelved by Netix. You can sense Banerjee channelling all these disparate frustrations in LSD 2, which is disdainful of corporates and algorithms, the soothing call of Big
Brother and the animated bleating of electric sheep.