‘Love, Sex Aur Dhokha 2’ movie review: Dibakar Banerjee sends a hate mail to the Internet

A nonetheless from ‘LSD 2: Love, Sex Aur Dhokha 2’

Dibakar Banerjee trawls the seamy, cynical underbelly of our on-line world and finds extra seaminess and cynicism. LSD 2 — a sequel to his 2010 found-footage thriller Love Sex Aur Dhokha — is a puzzling, grotesque, desperately bitter tackle know-how and cringe tradition, aesthetically scornful and thematically overwrought. Banerjee has, for years, been certainly one of our keenest satirists, his darkly contoured movies verging on observational comedy, sending up the excesses and manias of latest India. But LSD 2 finds him at the finish of his endurance, like somebody sending offended and undigested hate mail, caring not a jot.

Like the first movie, LSD 2 presents a triptych of tales, chaptered right here as ‘Like’, ‘Share’ and ‘Download’. In the first section, transwoman Noor (Paritosh Tiwari) is a participant on a Bigg Boss-like actuality present. When Noor’s estranged mom (Swaroopa Ghosh) enters the farce mid-season, the hunt for approval rankings will get hilariously weird. The second story follows Kullu (Bonita Rajpurohit), a transgender janitor at a Delhi metro station, in the aftermath of sexual assault. Finally, we wind up with Subham (Abhinav Singh), an 18-year-old gamer on the brink of influencer superstardom.

It promptly turns into clear how Banerjee — co-writing with Eeb Allay Ooo! (2019)‘s Pratik Vats and Shubham — views the Internet subcultures of today: as a cesspit of pretence and instant gratification, people’s identities commodified, fetishized, worshipful plenty beholden to digital puppeteers past their comprehension or management. The vitriol flows in each course, from the performative social justice allyship of personal corporations to the flaky creator financial system percolating center India, complicit in its personal oppression.

Banerjee takes on a lot, from trans rights to cyberbullying to massive tech thoughts management, and the muddle of concepts and avenues leaves the movie an inchoate mess. Remember the exact whiplash of Rajkummar Rao’s betrayal of his division retailer colleague in LSD? The new movie has a dozen potential pathways like that, however doesn’t pitch up.

The 2010 unique broke floor in digital cinematography in India, simulating the grainy ubiquity of hand-held camcorders, CCTV footage and spy cameras. The operative phrase in discovered footage cinema is ‘found’, a sense of surreptitious discovery lacking in LSD 2. Banerjee presents the Internet as an open, ugly scrapbook for everybody to learn, bounding indiscriminately throughout reside streams, information clippings and Virtual Reality, sometimes abandoning the conceit altogether for human point-of-view photographs.

The movie’s visible invention, as an alternative, lies in Tiya Tejpal’s manufacturing design, which works in surreal particulars in the background. In a subplot impressed by a actual Gurugram atrocity, as an example, we go to an elite personal college, its corridors adorned with cartoons of Elon Musk, Milkha Singh and entrepreneur Anand Mahindra. There is a extra explicitly dystopian imaginative and prescient afterward, a dizzying montage inside the metaverse, the flat textures and mucky colours of generative AI artwork turning into a image of homogenized society. The younger actors are all memorable, particularly Abhinav Singh as the streamer GamePappi, and Anmol Ahuja’s casting is brazenly sardonic: Anu Malik, Tusshar Kapoor and Sophie Choudry play the actuality present judges.

In a current podcast, Banerjee jokingly referred to himself as a “hectoring professor and biblical prophet rolled into one.” His alarmist doomsaying isn’t misplaced, and feels private. The director’s final movie, Tees, about three generations of an Indian Muslim household, was shelved by Netflix (Banerjee mentioned he’s purchasing it round for brand spanking new patrons). Even his contemporaries —administrators like Anurag Kashyap and Vishal Bharadwaj — have had their initiatives cancelled or stalled, platforms taking flight of politically-engaged materials fearing repercussions in an illiberal local weather. You can sense Banerjee channelling all these disparate frustrations in LSD 2, which is disdainful of corporates and algorithms, the soothing name of Big Brother and the animated bleating of electrical sheep.