Death Is At the Center of Banality
The lasting impact of a 2004 sex tape involving New Delhi students serves as inspiration for Indian filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee, who reflects on voyeurism in the digital era with LOVE SEX AUR DHOKHA.
Dibakar Banerjee's LOVE SEX AUR DHOKHA (Love, Sex and Betrayal) ostensibly assembles the stories behind the scandals, using hand-held video, closed circuit television, and spy cameras to loop us in and out of today's headlines. So what if the film sometimes forgets what kind of camera it has been shot on? LSD is still something of a high-concept, low-budget knockout, further consolidating hope that a Bombay New Wave really is in the offing.
Essentially three short films packed into a two-hour feature, LSD's first - and best - story involves a couple working on a film about star-crossed, class-divided lovers. This itself provides an occasion for parody and homage, but eager beaver Banerjee finds a way to elaborate the clichés of the film-within-a-film-within-a-film into pure nightmare for his social-rebel protagonists, splicing in a shock ending that'll take the wind out of you sooner than you can say 'Khap Panchayat'.
LSD then storms into its next chapter, where Banerjee surmounts the challenge of crafting an intelligible narrative out of nothing other than surveillance camera footage. Of course, he is aided in his efforts by the actors (who enunciate clearly and stand bang in the center of the fish-eye) but I'm not complaining. To his credit, cinematographer Nikos Andritsakis develops an unobtrusive visual style without distracting from the centerpiece: a campaign of seduction that begins in the aisles and backrooms of a small supply store and ends with a viral sex-tape on the Internet.
The film's closer details a sting op against the tawdry pop moghul ‘Loki’. Though it’s a bit of milquetoast, lacking the urgency and originality of the preceding material, the third chapter is occasionally salvaged by the helmer’s dark humour. Everywhere evident in LSD – in the sets, in the casting, in the shots, in the lines – is the same pathos that distinguished his KHOSLA KA GHOSLA and OYE LUCKY LUCKY OYE. In those films, Banerjee first shared his sense that the comic and the menacing are never more than a gap apart in India's exploding urbanity. With LSD, he stares for the first time into the maw of death at the center of banality – and closes the gap entirely.
NOTE: Banerjee is an expert in irony, but even he could not have predicted the speed with which film would race from the big screen to home video and on to the web. A high-quality, subtitled copy of LOVE SEX AUR DHOKHA is easily available for viewing on the Internet.
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