Dibakar Banerjee's third offering "Love Sex aur Dhokha" is an excellent case in point. His first movie "Khosla Ka Ghosla" continues to stay a multiplex favorite since it plays very well into middle class sensibilities that anything is achievable if one puts ones mind to it. This was followed by "Oye Lucky Lucky Oye" a much better movie where the director's disdain of class was depicted in the character of Paresh Rawal. But while Khosla Ka Ghosla may have been run-of-the-mill Multiplex fare and OLLO a chit of a movie, with his third offering he has broken into new ground.
A movie shot entirely with new comers and mostly on hand held, CCTV and sting operation cameras could very well have gone down the path of many other avant garde movies where content was subservient to form. But if one were to define classicism as an effortless intermingling of form and content it is to be found in this movie.
The movie as the title suggest is a collection of three interweaving stories about Love Sex and betrayal. While the first section about love is loosely inspired from DDLJ one can also make out the damning indictment on the mediocre fare that Bollywood mass produces in the name of Cinema by the director. This is about the only section that we had a problem with, where we thought that far too much time was devoted and a few more sections could have been edited out.
The second section and by far the most brilliant one tells the story of the vast urban non-rich. Adarsh seems to be a boy who is related to the owner of a super market looking at the CCTV footage of the shop. Rashmi is a girl working in the super market store who will be used very deviously by Adarsh. I cannot recall any movie in recent Bollywood history that has tried to tell the story of a girl working in a super market. Later in the concluding part of this section of the movie it is not even apparent as to whether the contact number she has given is a real one or not. A vast majority of the urban populace who escape the attention of the so-called new wave directors like Mr Farhan Akhtar.
The third section takes us through the travails of a TV journalist trying desperately to bring off a sting operation. The darkest possible form of humor ever seen in Bollywood cinema comes about in his attempts to commit suicide. Trying to help him in this endeavor is a Bengali girl (Who thankfully does not mouth sweet words in Bangla like "Ekdummmm Mishti") who has come to Delhi with dreams of being launched in a music video.
As Naseeruddin Shah says in this piece, once you cast a star in a movie (and this is true of Abhay Deol as well is what I feel) the movie tends to be about the star rather than the work itself. But in this case since it is a whole cast of new comers there is a starkness to this movie that is unparalleled in recent history and the lives of the principal characters are essentially messy like what most of us go through.
So unlike the synthetic clean lives that the principal protagonists of DCH led (ever wondered what Saif did for a living or how Akshaye could so easily earn so much as a painter) this in more ways than one mirrors everyday lives captured through a novel medium that of a much smaller camera. That is why we think this is easily aeons ahead of any Bollywood movie of the past decade (yeah DevD and DCH and Omkara included).
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