It’s been more than 12 hours and I have not yet recovered from the hangover suffered due to the cocktail named Love, Sex and Dhokha. Clarification: I am referring to the Dibakar Banerjee movie, just in case you thought otherwise. While in reality, I have only experienced two of the 3 mentioned aspects (and I would leave the guessing part to you!), Banerjee’s experiment made me feel a part of the gripping, topsy-turvy narration.
The last few years have witnessed a paradigm shift in the way stories are told in Bollywood. The run-of-the-mill stories have given way to out-of-the box ideas: The hero is no longer a Superhuman who can demolish dozens of men twice his size ( Let’s assume movies like Wanted don’t exist, for the time being); the snow-capped mountains of Switzerland have been replaced by the ghettos and crowded streets of some of the lesser-known areas within India; the songs have thankfully moved to the background and the dance sequences, if any, don’t seem out of place; Movies do not necessarily have a happy ending, where not everyone survives to live happily ever after. It is perhaps a sign of the growing vision and wisdom of the common man, who is not ready to keep his brain in the shelf when he/she goes to the theatre. True, Cinema still remains a source of entertainment and scriptless movies are still WELCOMEd by the Indian audiences; yet, there is space, scope and appreciation for a Mumbai Meri Jaan or a Gulaal as well. The Kashyaps and the Bharadwajs, along with the Abhay Deols and the KayKays, seem determined to change the course of Hindi Cinema. And after LSD, Dibakar Banerjee has forced his way into the list.
Not that his first two movies were NOT different. Khosla ka Ghosla was hilarious and satirical, and the characters, despite being realistic, were refreshingly funny. Oye Lucky… went a step ahead and introduced a darker side of Dibakar’s creative mind. But, with LSD, Dibakar breaks all barriers. While the images of Black Friday, Dev D and Kaminey are still fresh, LSD has to be the most daring movie made in the last decade or so. From honour killings to sex scandals to sting operations, Dibakar presents it all in a bold, brazen way that Indian audiences have never witnessed before. For example, he does not show splashes of blood to signify the death of the lovebirds in the movie; instead, he challenges you to be witness to their gruesome end. And at the same instance forces us to think about numerous such instances which take place in our country everyday, which we prefer to ignore. His take on Love and Sex are so brutally honest that you have no option but to take notice of the events as they unfold through the digital eye of the ubiquitous camera. In terms of sheer entertainment value, it is not the sort of movie you may like to watch with your family, yet you must watch it, for this may be one of the landmark movies in the history of Indian Cinema.
Do I sound like one of those movie critics who has been paid by the makers to write goodie-goodie things about the movie? Well, the fact is that watching this movie has made me poorer by Rs. 200 (Yes, I stay in Gurgaon, village of the rich) and I have spent my last 30 minutes typing aimlessly on my roomie’s laptop. But then, you do stupid things when you are high. And, being an IDIOT, I have been told, is in fashion these days.
