The Light in the Dark

LOVE SEX AUR DHOKHA 2 ★★★★1/2 Director: Dibakar Banerjee Cast: Tusshar Kapoor, Swastika Mukherjee, Mouni Roy, Anu Malik, Sophie Choudhury, Urfi Javed, Paritosh Tiwari, Bonita Rajpurohit, Abhinav Singh, Swaroopa Ghosh, Nimrit Ahluwalia

IT’S BEEN 14 years since the original Love Sex Aur Dhoka, a pathbreaking film which held up multiple mirrors to societal ills of the time: ‘honour killings’, TV ‘reality shows’ using sex videos for blackmail and TRPS, and a ‘Me-too’ segment much before it started spilling out of the dark crevices of the entertainment industry.

But as soon as this part two begins, we are plunged into a much darker, much more savage universe, so hard-edged that the earlier era seems relatively innocent, almost prehistoric. Like the earlier iteration, this new film, written by Banerjee, Shubham and Prateek Vats (Eeb Alley Ooo!), is expressly created to provoke and challenge, in order for us to ask the questions that we should all be asking: How did we get here? And where do we go from here?

In the first LSD, cinematographer Nikos Andritsakis surrounded us by multiple cameras — the CCTVS, the video cameras, the cell-phones, hand-held, shaky, picking up the rhythms of lived lives — a dizzying array of seeing eyes which showed us that we are always on show.

There are as many cameras, now even more pervasive, and big-brother-big-boss type in Love, Sex, Dhokha, which has decisively morphed into ‘Like, Share, Download’. Social media is a giant, with a constantly open maw, hungry for shock and sensation, all niceties downplayed to upsell people as ‘products’. We all seem to be functioning in a giant talent/ entertainment show, where we can only ostensibly be ‘on’ and ‘off cam’, but we are always being assessed for ‘marks’: Anu Malik, Mouni Roy and Tusshar Kapoor appear as ‘judges’ with their numbered placards. Noor, the trans person (Tiwari) vying for the top slot, is always on the spot: will she dance in front of her disapproving mother (Ghosh), will her ‘boyfriend’ kiss her on camera, will he even touch her if she eats non-veg during ‘pious’ days? With flashes, in smartly-inserted subversive scenes of the minorities and the oppressed being routinely trampled, even as 75 years of Indian Independence are being celebrated.

The second segment, which uses another LGBTQI person (Rajpurohit) to question corporate venality and skewed power structures, has Swastika Mukherjee in a career-best performance, stuck in a position with zero wiggle room. Only if she crushes someone weaker, will she be able to help herself. And the third one looks at the world of ‘content creators’ personified by Shubham (Singh), ‘influencers’, and the unending quest for millions of followers: how far will you go? This one, featuring Urfi Javed in a walk-on part, the influencer to beat all influencers, is the noisiest and the most all-over-the-place, but also the scariest: a TV anchor who may or may not resemble someone in real-life, stomping about the studio in a VR headset, leads us into a pretty world of green grass and blue waterfalls and serene bodies in yogic poses. Is this where we, the dead-beat citizens, will end up? Are we all memes? Is our Orrification complete? Is this our future?

This is Banerjee at his angriest, his rage leaching out of every frame. (Tees, his previous film, a futuristic look at the past and present, is stuck in limbo). Wait, let me dial back. This is not just an angry film. Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 is a scream of rage, mixed with a confounded befuddlement. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a Hindi film as politically and socially trenchant as this one. Up till now, I’ve always thought of LSD as the director’s best film: it was a clear first on many counts, a meta-film that spoke to our internalisation of films-as-pop-culture, seeped into our DNA, and troubling questions of the barrier between what can be seen, and what should be seen, while keeping an eye on the moral centre. This LSD redux is not as original, but is as sharp, and as impactful. When Banerjee cuts us, we bleed.