When Imagination Puts on ‘Virtual’ Mirrors
Starting from Valentine’s Day, audiences have anticipated ‘Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2’ from the time the motion poster was unveiled. The screen’s heart was glowing in red with pulsating images of Instagram, reels, and social apps. The tagline states “Yeh Valentine’s Day nahin asaan…Love Sex aur Dhokha ka dariya hai aur doob ke jaana hai!” This suggests how during these times, love, sex and betrayal, all drown in filters and avatars.
In his own words, ‘Dibakar Banerjee’ LSD 2 does not think of it as a sequel, but more so as how we live life for a camera today. There are, as he says, multiple truths existing all at once. The offline self, the online self, the persona, and the feed. The issue is how all of these versions come together.
One Digital Pulse, Three Stories
The film’s structure integrates three interconnected narrative arcs. The first is Truth Ya Naach, a reality television competition in which Noor (played by Paritosh Tiwari), a transgender woman, wrestles and performs with the scrutiny and the voracious gaze of the audience, battling and creating selfhood, fame, and the endless desire for a social persona.
Abhinav Singh’s Game Paapi, an influencer-gamer, has to deal with content creation, trolls, and the dichotomy of followers and real life. As well as Kullu, played by Bonita Rajpurohit, whose sad complexity is the ache of trans representation, identity and transphobia in a trendy society. The three ‘stories’ intertwine with each other, showing the common anxieties of a generation under the gaze of the online world.
Symbolism is pervasive. The reality-show judges, Anu Malik, Tusshar Kapoor, and Sophy Choudry, do not just judge the contestants but serve as reality’s hyper-real figures reinforcing a society that clouds societal value with market value. The “truth meter” is an abstraction of reality television that gauges morality with currency, and virtue is bought in TRPs, while the tears are hidden, and sponsorships loosen the purse strings.
The Anxiety of Kullu as Bonita Rajpurohit
“The strange thing is, with the auditions and the workshops, I found myself in a position where I was, ‘Am I doing what I should be doing?’ Rajpurohit said. The courageous script of the film, which is still in its work, pushed her to the edges of identity, exposure, and intimacy. The fear that Kullu has, resonates with the audience and the performance shifts. ‘It is a conversation between the actor and her that we are witnessing’, recalls the actor.
The nuanced role of Abhinav Singh from Game Paapi required him to attend multiple workshops and undergo a complete body transformation. His emerged from a process of shedding weight and embodying a gamer-like immersion. Ironically, Singh is an outdoor person and spending so much time indoors, adopting the mannerisms of a screen devotee and the drone-like behavior associated with following screen content is totally alien to him.
Paritosh Tiwari has also stated that the role of Noor has significantly more need for empathy and greater emotional depth. With the decision for the cast the role of a trans woman with a cis male actor, debate emerged. Banerjee stated that yes, the potential of casting a trans woman to play the role of the lead was discussed. However, the need for a balance of trans visibility and cis normativity within the film.
The contrast between what the trailers promised and what the film actually delivered.
Shock was the focal point in the trailers, with themes of disruption on the digital world, obsession, betrayal, and voyeurism. This excitement generated conversation on social media – shall we describe this as darker than the original made in 2010? Would the delicate touch of censorship end in a muted film? and, would our audience, so distant from the reels and reality shows, still be able to be shocked?
Upon the film’s arrival, people were split on the film. In particular aspects of the film such as production design, backdrops with a metaverse style, and the use of drones, AR filters, and Screenlife aesthetics, a lot of people liked the ambition. The fusion to an app gave excitement to the younger audiences, who were eager for a film with visual excitement.
The film, however, was criticized for the lack of equal strength in storytelling in all of the pieces. There were multiple thin and muddled pieces, and the last third felt a bit more isolated than the rest. LSD 2 is a film that has the bravery as well as the unevenness to go to extremes.
More than what shows on surface level.
The layers go deeper than the digital chaos that the film depicts.
The sections of the metaverse that avatars dissolve into in the digital backdrops represent the loss of identity in the overflowing digital world. The primitive glitchy colors, flat textures, and pixelated skins illustrates the loss of individuality over the loss of self.
Halls adorned with posters of Elon Musk, Milkha Singh and Anand Mahindra illustrate just how much we idolize these people while selling and consuming dreams heroes have become influencers and their images are used for.
The so-called “truth meter,” serves as an indicator of how our society demands authenticity and punishes lies while, in exchange, offering ‘intimate’ relationships as content for public consumption rather than private interactions that are saved for special occasions.
Casting Choices, Casting Losses
One of the forgotten pieces of the IDM2 puzzle deals with Nimrit Kaur Ahluwalia, one of the actresses cast in this film. After the initial recording of the scripts, she decided to drop out. She said that the bold themes and explicit scenes did not suit her personal preferences. Her absence, unfortunately, brought in new participants.
Another headline choice was Uorfi Javed, a social media figure and Youtube star celebrated for her controversial and outrageous clothing and for her constant need to go viral. In the case of a film which looks at lives online and electronically, the artistic pantomime of casting a ‘digital star’ was a stroke of genius. She and only Banerjee could cross that border between real and unreal in ways as these.
In the promotional video shoot, lead trio Bonita, Abhinav, and Paritosh performed several workshops that lasted for months. Banerjee insisted there be immersion and participation, so for days they discussed social media, wrote posture essays, and performed theatrical exercises. This is a form of acting that focuses more on possesion.
The Film’s Real Message
The principal focus of LSD2 is on the discontent of the time, which is neither optimistic, but rather dystopic. It illustrates clearly the dangers of being over-connected to one’s devices, and the consequence of merging self-belief with social media affirmation, the loss of self and self within a self.
In the online world, the multiple truths of which Banerjee himself referred to: the Instagram truth, the offline truth, the truth within the family, and the strangers’ comments. LSD2 is phenomenological, it does not resolve them. It offers the binds and overlaps of our truths raw, unresolved, and painful, like our unashamedly exposed scrolling.
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