LSD 2 review: Dibakar Banerjee's film is ahead of its times
Love, Sex Aur Dhoka 2 poster
It has been 14 long years since Dibakar Banerjee's sharp, edgy film Love Sex Aur Dhoka came out. A film that talked about the perils of spy cams, webcams, and CCTV cameras and how they breach privacy. 14 years on, Banerjee flips the narrativea bit where - privacy is a thing of the past, especially in the age of social media. Banerjee's LSD 2 talks of the duality in society - which is hungry for validation in digital space even as personal lives are crumbling.
An anthology of three stories - interlinked with each other loosely - LSD 2 hits you hard with its treatment. The first story is of Noor (Paritosh Tripathi), a trans person participating in a reality TV show called Truth or Naach (dance) - an amalgamation of Big Brother, Jhalak Dikhla Jaa and America's Top Model. Noor uses her identity to leverage her time on the show, which itself manufactures reality. The moment she is on cam, her likes and ratings increase, the moment she is off it - it decreases and pose as a threat of elimination. The show alters reality according to TRPs, likes, and ratings and uses Noor and her strained relationship with her estranged mother (Swaroopa Ghosh) to sensationalise the show and grab more eyeballs.
The second story is of Kullu (Bonita Rajpurohit) a transwoman who works in a local subway station which is known to only employ transgenders as workers. A video blogger, who stays in a 'hi-fi' house with her soon-to-be husband is one day found unconscious on the road heavily bruised. On the behest of social activist Lovina (Swastika Mukherjee), Kulu agrees to file a case of rape. But as investigations begin on the case, the truth about Kullu and her life comes out and so do prejudices against the trans community which shows the dual face of many who claim to the world that they are advocates of the LBGTQ community.
The third story of Shubham or Gamer Paapi (Anubhav Singh) a star YouTuber who is hungry for validation and moolah from his subscribers and followers. Shubham's middle-class parents cannot afford a lot of the luxuries that he has been able to get for them just by being on YouTube and being a gamer. Nothing seems to rattle him - his fans getting a glimpse of his sexual preferences, memes around him, his school principal reprimanding him, juniors heckling him - because on the digital space, he is a star and that's all that matters. It's only when a student dies in school and the cops question him, that he starts questioning himself.
While the first two stories portray the hollowed society we live in where validation is more important than interpersonal relationships, the third talks of the dangerous side of the internet and its ability to almost control one's life. I felt Banerjee was most indulgent with his third story which loses focus mid-way and transitions into the metaverse and ends on a rather bizarre note.
Banerjee and co-writers Prateek Vats and Shubham (the writers of Eeb Allay Ooo!) highlight the woke culture, misogyny in society and gender inequality well in the first two stories, but the plot loses focus by the third story. The narrative is very much in your face, indulgent and makes you think about the shallow perspectives on life that most of us have.
Cis man Paritosh Tiwari gets into the skin of his character as transwoman Noor so effortlessly that it is hard to separate the actor and the character. His performance stays long after the film is over. Swastika Chatterjee and Bonita too are beautiful in their story which talks about the woke yet insensitive and misogynist society we live in. Anubhav Singh as Gamer Paapi is also very convincing but the story is deeply incoherent and hence not as enjoyable as the other stories.
LSD2 is technically a very fine film. The film gives multiple perspectives, from CCTV cameras, mobile phone shot videos, and studio cameras, to zoom call interaction over tablets and laptops and cinematographers Anand Bansal, Riju Das and Priyashanker Ghosh do a splendid job in making the narrative look real. A film that keeps changing the screen quite rapidly according to the medium it wants to portray, the editing has to be very good and edgy and Naman Arora does a superb job at the editing table.
While Dibakar Banerjee talks of the Internet, people's obsession with the Internet and how it is controlling our narrative in the present day, the treatment is something that regular cinema viewers in India are not used to , hence making this film slightly ahead of its time. Some may find the film incoherent, some too bold. Even though it drives home very important points about the digital obsession that lies in our society, its treatment may not sit well with most.
