Movie review: Love Sex Aur Dhoka

Cast: Anshuman Jha, Shruti, Rajkumar Yadav, Neha Chauhan
Genre: Drama
Direction: Dibakar Banerjee
Duration: 1 hour 38 minutes

Story:

The film works through three short stories which focus on contemporary India's attitude towards love and sex and its unending appetite for voyeurism. In the first story two film institute students have to complete a diploma film which is their tribute to Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge. They fall in love, believing themselves to be a real-life Raj and Simran, much to the discomfiture of the girl's conservative family.

In the second film, a boy wants to make an MMS clip and uses the close circuit TV in a mall to meet his devious ends. But first, he must befriend a gullible girl and win her trust...before betraying it.

In the third film, a TV journalist is sent on a sting operation by his TRP-hungry employer. He must unveil the ugly underbelly of the entertainment industry by exposing the casting couch. His instruments: his spy camera, a small-time dancer who wants to cut a music video, any which way and an exploitative pop singer.

Movie Review:

You want something new. Go watch Love Sex aur Dhokha. It ain't anything like you've seen before on the desi screen. But be forewarned. Dibakar Banerjee's film is meant to be seen and savoured by shedding all your moth-balled beliefs about how commercial cinema must or must not be. Like the 3-D glasses which gave you a whole new kick out of James Cameron's Avatar, here too, you need a new vision to understand how a breed of smart, young, professionals are hell bent on pushing the envelope of traditional Bollywood and literally pulling out the rabbit from the hat. The rabbit? A completely new idiom that only the bold and venturesome can dare to enunciate.

Of course, the box office does matter to them, as it does to everyone else. But unlike the rest, these restless filmmakers also believe creativity isn't about bottom lines alone. There's a whole new Pandora that lies beyond the tried and tested terrain. The question here is: Do we let these Columbus-like Creatives voyage on into No-man's land or do we insist on demanding a cinema that simply blends with the butter in our popcorn?

Now that's a difficult choice, we do agree. But here's a suggestion. How about juggling the popcorn flick with the edgy, new avant garde one that may neither be the laugh riot nor the sugar-candy rom-com you like to round up your week-end with. Instead, it might be that one watershed mark in movielore that might enter your diary as `Films to see when I'm bored with blah-blah Bollywood'.

Hence, the importance of Love Sex aur Dhokha, a film that not only dares to take up every sleazy story that has grabbed the headlines of Indian newspapers in the recent past, it also endeavours to tell it differently. Like Steven Soderbergh's Sex Lies and Videotape and the more recent Paranormal Activity, the film uses the hand-held camera as an integral character in the story, even as it narrates the entire plot through its jerky, shaky, intimate angles. So, you end up watching a painted toe nail, while the struggling dancer tries to seduce the pop singer or maybe, even the plaster-peeling ceiling, while a scuffle ensues on the floor of a mall. But, hey, the DoP (Nikos Andritsakis) ensures you're always there, at vantage point, as the VVIP Voyeur. Could you ask for a better place!

Thematically, the film is a sledgehammer too. You'll find shades of every sex, love and crime scandal Miss Jammu, Nitish Katara-Bharti Yadav, Tehelka's sting, the MMS clip and many more you've closely followed over the last few years. Yet, kudos to the scriptwriters (Dibakar Banerjee and Kanu Behl), who have steered clear of all moralistic judgmental pronouncements on the proceedings. The revulsion, the pathos and the hypocrisy of our middle-class morality springs out naturally, through restrained story-telling. The other innovation of the film is its casting. Getting raw actors, signed on after sundry actor workshops, has proved to be a boon for the film and added a slice-of-life realism to the proceedings. The boy who lures the simple mall attendant, the lovers who see themselves as Raj-Simran avatars, the desperate wannabe diva who oscillates between good guy and sleazy guy are completely believable with their surging hormones and sometimes-shaky morals.