Nothing prepares you for Love, Sex & Dhokha!

Thereis no love in any quickly-digestible packages, little on-screen sex, and a wholelot of dhokha in Dibakar Banerjee's third and most tricky film...Tricky, becausethe characters are constantly talking and living their lives on camera. We seethem as they are, stripped of all vanity, ridiculously self-serving but stillcapable of bouts of guilt and caring.
Love Sex Aur Dhokha isa mirror-image, and more, of a world that has made up its mind to sell its heartand most of its soul to the camera.There are three stories in the film rolledtogether less by design than chance. Unlike other episodic films, this onedoesn’t flirt with finesse. Instead Banerjee fornicates with ferociousrealism born out of a desperate generation’s craving to make a place in asociety that recognizes you for your financial rather than emotional orintellectual prosperity.
The first story entitled Superhit Pyar hitsyou in the solar-plexus when the father of the rich girl Shruti (Shruti) and hernewly-married husband Rahul (Anshuman Jha) are taken to a desolate highway andhacked to pieces. This, after we see Rahul, the director, making a film withShruti in the lead that looks a Bhojpuri version of Dilwale Dulhaniya LeJayenge. Love does just hurt, it hacks.
Nothing that has come beforeprepares us for the savagery of the dying moments. Banerjee’s narrative isrelentless in its pursuit of a cinematic language that comes closest to theunalloyed colloquialisms of every-day life. These are characters you’veprobably seen melt in the melee of the humdrum. Nikos Andritsakis’cinematography picks out these characters from their allotted anonymity to placethem in positions that are always compromising, sometimes poignant and funnybut brutally honest. It couldn’t have been easy for the cinematographer todeliberately distort the images on screen as per the camera-recordings of thecharacters. Imperfection, in this case, is a given. Distortion a demand of destiny.
The spoofy spirit of the pre-climactic segment of the firststory Superhit Pyar shifts gears in the second story Paap Ki Dukaan where adesperate social climber ironically named Adarsh (Raj Kumar Yadav) lures aninnocent salesgirl in a supermarket Rashmi (Neha Chauhan) into the backroom forsome MMS sex.
Significantly, the man who wants to make money out ofon-camera sex, is half in love with the clueless girl, and is tempted to switchoff the camera when he finally gets to the sex.
But the consciencecan go to hell. It will find plenty of company there. The third and by far themost well-rounded and incisive story Badnaam Shohrat finally throws forward aconscientious protagonist. The growing fondness between the closet-idealist of ajournalist Prabhat (Amit Sial) and the miserably unhappy item girl Naina (AryaDevdutta) is a savage indictment of ‘news’ as we see it today ontelevision. Go take a bite of this sound byte.
The grotesquelycaricatural pop singer Loki Local (Herry Tengri) in the third story is asavagely satirical symptom of a sick society looking for instant gratification.
It isn’t as if every moment in this tightly packed sardine-canof excitable emotions is savage brutal and aggressive. The sensitive momentsjust creep up on the creepy moments nourishing bathing and mollifying the savageexterior of a world gone ruthlessly and desperately selfish andimmoral.
Dibakar Banerjee creates a digital world resorting todesperate measures. His characters are ordinary people extraordinarilychallenged by the sheer obligation of day-to-day living. While thesecharacters—social ‘mess’-fits symptomatic of a newmaterialistic ‘muddle’ class—record all their moves and actionon self-operated cameras (shaky, hazy, lazy and sometime crazy but always awindow to their souls) the director records their stories without overtcinematic interventions.
This is where the film’s mainproblems props up. The director vision is so unified to the way the characterssee themselves that a section of the audience may feel it’s watching ahugely self-indulgent work that wants to keep the ‘cinema’ out ofcinema.
The material binding the three stories is edited like ahome video where the relevance of the characters depends on our off-camera familiarity with them. The people in Love Sex Aur Dhokha need no introduction or back-projection. They are who they are, without the participation of cinematic devices. Banerjee almost sneaks in on these people to violate their non-privatized lives.
The characters personal spaces arealready violated by self-deployed cameras. Dibakar Banerjee doesn’tact the voyeuristic director even when the girl in the supermarket is on theground making love with the desperate guy who has spent all his time andeffort to get her there.
Why is there no triumph in his love-making?Love Sex Aur Dhokha is not a film about celebrating the end of anindividual’s right to privacy. It’s a rigorously recorded pseudo-documentary about people who have thrown all caution and discretion tothe winds because they’ve no choice.
The film never belittlesor sentimentalizes the characters’ lack of choices. While inventing a unique format of cinematic expression Dibakar Banerjee has not emotionallyemasculated the characters. Even when they’re doing it for a camera theiremotions are not out of our range of vision. In terms of technique thisfilm gets as rough and jolting as any film can. The actors look likereality-show rejects making a last-bid attempt to prove theirworth.
They got the point.This is a film that has no-referencepoint. Except the people we see all around us.
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