Dibakar Banerjee has always been an audacious and experimental filmmaker. When an idea strikes him — and most often than not, it is an idea worth bringing to screen — he doesn’t rest till he runs with it.
Fourteen years ago, Banerjee — who debuted with Khosla Ka Ghosla, still considered one of the most potent satires in mainstream Hindi cinema — created a fresh idiom of filmmaking with Love Sex Aur Dhokha, acronym-ed aptly to LSD, a descriptor for the web of addiction that modern-age technology spins across almost every demographic. In LSD, which arrested attention immediately, the filmmaker put together three interlinked stories to comment on the voyeurism that the omnipresent camera brings with it. But what was a novelty then is, unfortunately, part of an increasingly scary popular culture now.
In LSD 2, Banerjee takes the same format of three interlinked stories and looks at the far more heady and multi-pronged world of the Internet and what it brings along with it. The three segments are titled ‘Like’, Share’ and ‘Download’, each of which ultimately illustrates ‘love’, ‘sex’ and ‘dhokha’. What ties all three stories — one about the hyperreal world of reality shows, the other about the hypocrisy of modern-day woke-ism and the third about the fallout of the addiction to digital media — is the common thread of homosexuality, with a real-life transgender actor playing the lead in the second segment.
What Dibakar and producer Ektaa R. Kapoor have attempted is creative and courageous, but LSD 2 gets carried away with the inventiveness of its ideas. The behind-the-scenes rot that goes into keeping the ratings of a reality show alive — in this case, one known as ‘Truth Ya Naach’ where manufactured emotions (“Reality ratings Maa mein hain”, says someone) — are milked to the last TRP decimal and makes the first segment relatable but also exaggerated in parts. The idea to film it in the way reality shows are captured on camera is an authentic touch, but using the same technique for the second story — that of an abused transgender grade-4 worker in a prominent metro station being reduced from victim to villain to suit the agenda of the employer — is unnecessary and grating.
The third story, that of a young gamer being sucked into a world of DeepFake, is horrific, with Dibakar and co-writers Shubham and Prateek Vats (who wrote the award-winning Eeb Allay Ooo!) diving fully into exploring the ramifications of what the metaverse demands of us.
What LSD2 — through potent performances from Bonita Rajpurohit, Abhinav Singh, Paritosh Tiwari, Swastika Mukherjee and Swaroopa Ghosh — shows us is a mirror. The reflection, however, may only appeal to some.
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