Love, Sex aur Dhokha: an armed coup review

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There is nothing that has intrigued me more than this video on Youtube.com. As I write, it has been seen over a whopping 30 million times and parodied, remixed and animated by hundreds of Youtube users. All you see in this video is a person called Chris Crocker sobbing uncontrollably and pleading with his audience to, well, leave Britney alone.

We can safely assume that it is just another disconcerting byproduct of the democratisation of the image making and sharing processes. While ever-simplifying video technologies and access to a powerful medium like the World Wide Web are - without any doubt - empowering, they sometimes also come together to yield such worrying results.

But there is no supply without demand. Cinema (or for that matter, any visual medium) largely draws upon our latent voyeuristic tendencies. We like peeking into others' lives without them looking back at us; darker the surroundings, the better. We derive immense pleasure in watching angels fall, as long as we are not caught falling ourselves. None of the 30 million viewers who saw Rocker's video would really like to exchange places with him, but nevertheless they came, they saw and they left some really sickening comments behind.  

Dibakar Banerjee’s Love, Sex aur Dhokha, or LSD as it's being called, is an attempt to explore the role that image making and watching has come to acquire in our lives. While it more than succeeds on the form front, it does not do as much as it could have in terms of content. It is a landmark film nonetheless.

While Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies & Videotape revolutionised the American independent film movement, LSD doesn’t seek to revolutionise any movement. In its intention it is more of an armed coup. Banerjee, rather aggressively, defies every written and unwritten rule of the Bollywood directors’ hand-book, and overthrows the traditional film-making conventions.

LSD comprises of three story lines that bisect each other during various points in the film; a diploma film being made by a bunch of students, an MMS scandal involving a supermarket attendant and a sting operation carried out to frame a sleazy pop-star. It's impossible to get into the details of the stories without spoiling the experience for prospective audience, but it is sufficient to say here that not once during the 110 minutes duration of the film you'll be able to look away from screen.

Unsettling in parts, LSD sucks you deeper into the narrative with each passing moment. Banerjee turns the audience into willing and shameless voyeurs as he hands over the camera to them. The third person objective point of view assumed by the director pushes froward the spectators to become a party to the drama unfurling on the screen. The sometimes shaky, sometimes blurred and most of the times ill-composed imagery only aids to preserve this make-believe association until the end of the film.

All the protagonists are etched out quite well and the actors realise them with much restraint. They all come across as pretty normal people that you and I can relate to. They appear naive and vulnerable and that's because the joke is actually on you, the voyeur. Do their miseries titillate you? Or do you end up empathising with them? Either way, the film achieves its purpose.

Now to the point that lets the film down a bit. While the film, as the title suggests, limits itself to the exploration of love, sex and betrayal - and it does a good job of it - the three stories seem quite similar. Banerjee, in my opinion could have expanded the theme 'subversion of technology' to include related ideas like, say, surveillance in Big Brother kind of a way.

But I quite like the film it is. It'll definitely encourage budding filmmakers to go out there and just shoot their film. Perhaps they are out there shooting already? Is that a camera I see? What's that whirring sound? Oye mister, why are you shooting me?

Yes, so as you see it's going to stay with you for sometime - while you are in a changing room, while you are putting your office photocopier to some good use, or while you're getting cosy with you girlfirend in a cab.

I got quite a kick seeing this signboard in the theatre lobby. It  read : SMILE! YOU'RE ON CAMERA...