Dibakar Banerjee cements his place as Bollywood's provocateur-in-chief

Even in one of his lesser films, Shanghai (2012), director Dibakar Banerjee orchestrates a moment of sublime chaos. The article number Imported Kamaria, which is interspersed with the doctor's (Prosenjit Chatterjee) speech, is about to end. As the doctor leaves the stage, a tempo picks up. The people around him are scared, livid, and confused, but Banerjee cuts to the final moments of the song where the bureaucrats are clapping out of obligation, and the impartial applause drowns out the cries of the tragedy that has just occurred. I remembered this scene while watching the second segment of Banerjee's latest feature film, Loving sex and cheating 2 (LSD2) when some people start shouting at each other around a badly injured character, even as one of them nonchalantly continues clicking pictures.

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A sequel to its own 2010 film Loving sex and cheating which used the form of a found footage film to examine the rot of a society that was coming to terms with the technology that surrounded it fourteen years later, Banerjee uses the same conceit to take a look at a company that forgot to log out. If LSD2 we must believe it, our entire existence today is a performance. It's not just about a nearby camera, but also about the people around us. Our behavior changes depending on what we want next, and our true self comes out behind closed doors. At one point, a TV executive points out how the best moments in a character's life happen off-camera, especially on a reality show where the more you expose yourself, the more likely you are to be valid.

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Banerjee and co-writers Prateek Vats and Shubham (who were behind 2019's Oh my God!), write three stories about people playing the perception game. Theres Noor (Paritosh Tiwari) takes part in a reality show that seems like a hybrid of everything out there Great leader, Roadies, divided villa, Go to the bottom of the water, Indian idol etc. There's Lovina (Swastika Mukherjee), a mid-level bureaucrat whose empathy leaves the room when she realizes how even slightly tainted her noble enterprise is. And finally, there's a YouTuber called Shubham who talks like it's nothing during his live streams, which has earned him almost 6 million followers. >

While Banerjee's sly observations usually take the form of a scalpel in her other films, LSD2 is a machete. He has no patience or curiosity for what lies beneath. He already knows that, and it's not pretty. The second story, Sex, features trans actress Bonita Rajpurohit as Kulu, a diversity hire to highlight a company's social responsibility. Rajpurohit is excellent in a scene where she simultaneously pleads, demands, demands and threatens Lovina to let her return to work, just days after she was raped. This is the kind of economy we expect from a Dibakar Banerjee film.

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Noor, trying to win a reality show competition, uses her estranged mother to gain audience sympathy. She deploys a strategic kiss, which causes a judge (played by Anu Malik) to stand up and say something that will soon take an unfortunate turn in memes. There is a hilarious scene in the third story, where a principal tells her student that it's okay if he's different after a few controversial photos go viral, while the boy continues to insist that that he is no different, implying that he is not gay.

LSD2 is a relentless assault on the senses that doesn't believe in restraint. After all, its director only recently made a film (Teenager) which will not see the light of day. He also witnessed the utter ugliness that occurred after his lead actor (from Detective Byomkesh Bakshy, 2014) committed suicide. With her latest film, Banerjee feels in the mood to give back. Which explains his fixation on the word think (dirty). Maybe there is no salvation and we implode, stroking our egos in dark rooms, with our faces staring at the screen in front of us.>