Love, Sex Aur Dhokha: A review

It's not your Bollywood take on Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), although its name seems to chime in with the Soderbergh film. Dibakar Banerjee's Love, Sex Aur Dhokha (or LSD) takes on the peeping Toms that we all are. In our world, voyeurism is a mass-market fetish, courtesy reality TV. In the film's neo-noir world, the voyeurs are also exhibitionists and we, as audience, are privy to their intimate lives. But who watches us? Do we have any privacy left in our own lives?

As a filmmaker, Banerjee is a class apart. His Khosla Ka Ghosla (2006) and Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008) garnered much critical acclaim. Now, LSD, his third, reaffirms his reputation. Mixing comic with tragic, authentic with faux, what the director offers here may not be suitable for all palates, but the product holds appeal for the discerning viewer who's drawn to participate in the film's action as a smug fetishist.

The realism Banerjee creates with hand-held and static cameras, and the unfamiliar faces that people the film's cast remind one of The Blair Witch Project (1999). Again, the faux banner of Dee Bee Films has its precursor in the fake trailers from Tarantino-Rodriguez's 2007 horror double bill Grindhouse. But the Bollywood director is far from imitative and his LSD doesn't induce a psychedelic escape from reality – it thrusts the audience into reality.

The three stories of love, sex and dhokha (betrayal) are interconnected, and the minor characters in one become major in another and vice versa. In the first story, Rahul, a student filmmaker, falls in love with his heroine, Shruti; in the second, salesgirl Roshmi is lured by the unemployed Adarsh who's actually planning to make an amateur porn clip through the department store's security camera; in the third, sting journalist Prabhat teams up with wannabe music video star Naina to expose an unscrupulous Bhangra pop star.

Nikos Andritsakis gives a photographic tour de force. His camera beautifully creates the realism so essential to the director's vision. Small wonder that his popularity is up 155% on IMDB in three days since the film's release. The same can be said of Namrata Rao's masterly editing that keeps the film's running time to a taut 108 minutes. And above all, there's the brilliant performance by the ensemble cast of unknowns (Anshuman Jha, Shruti, Raj Kumar Yadav, Neha Chauhan, Amit Sial, Arya and Herry Tangdi).

LSD is not for the squeamish. Its raw realism would shock the vast majority of audiences fed on mainstream Bollywood fantasies. But Dibakar Banerjee's film is destined to become a cult classic that dares to critique our hunger for reality TV and question the morality of media vigilantism.


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