Love, Sex Aur Dhoka : A Brilliant Experiment

The Gods became very annoyed. They were seething with anger and remorse. It went out of their bounds. They finally descended upon the Earth and held an emergency meeting at a secret cave in the Himalayas. After careful deliberations and detailed discussions about the human agenda on feminism and post-modernism in the 21st Century, they gave their final verdict : the 1975-born lass named Ekta Kapoor will be eternally condemned to hell for stereotyping Indian womanhood in all her third-rated Saas-Bahu soaps and such other mediocre television serials churned out of her production company, unless she redeems herself with one spectacular production before the end of the Maha Kumbh Mela by April 2010. This left Ekta Kapoor with no other choice but to perform a penance to wash away all her sins accumulated thus far and to take a radically unimaginable step of her life : to produce India's first experimental dogma cinema, having its roots in the counter-cultural film movement, namely, Love, Sex Aur Dhoka.

Dibakar Bannerjee, whose eccentric photo is inset above, has directed this brilliantly new endeavour on celluloid. Love, Sex Aur Dhoka is a film entirely shot with digital and spy cameras with a minimal budget. It deals with the complex subject-matter of voyeurism, sex and dubious morality prevailing in our contemporary society. The film does not have any of those model-turned-starlets who appear as blinking dolls and shake their bodies to titillate our senses, compensating their inability to deliver a simple dialogue or express a single emotion cinematically. And there are no hunk-turned-actors with their bleating voices and bloated egos around. But it has cast a wonderful team of talented new actors whose acting skills are extra-ordinary. The script and the art of story-telling are masterly and a class apart from the mainstream Bollywood flicks that we have been used to.

The film is composed of three different stories, each one taking a leaf out of the contemporary thematic of India : love in the times of continuing caste oppression, all-pervasive sexual voyeurism, media manipulation and in the whole game, the complicity and betrayal of each to everyone. Including you and me as its consumers. I do not want to get into the details of any of the three stories as the film is ought be relished from the beginning till the end without any prejudice. Each of the story has been shot with a distinct style and the cinematographic finesse of Nikos Andritsakis is stunningly powerful. Though the time and the space linkage between the three stories are tenuous, it has been deftly handled so as to consummate the experience of watching this film deeply provoking. There are certain portions of the film which I feel could have been handled with more subtlety like the climactic sequence in the first story Love. And there could have been a more nuanced narrative at certain junctures of the second story Sex and the third story Dhoka. But these are minor flaws which can be overlooked given the beauty of this daringly experimental film, being the first of its kind in Indian cinema.

The film Love, Sex aur Dhoka draws its inspiration from the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski's poetic film Camera Buff (1979), from the American director Steven Soderbergh's disturbing movie Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) and most importantly, from the rules formulated as The Vow of Chastity Manifesto of the Dogme-95 movement spearheaded by two the Danish directors ~ Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in 1995. The Dogme-95 is a counter-cultural cinematic movement which laid its emphasis on diegesis rather than mimesis. The fundamental precepts of Diegesis and Mimesis were enunciated by Plato in his Republic to distinguish the artistic expressions of the human mind. The essential attribute of Diegesis is narration or reporting while that of Mimesis is imitation or representation. The Danish Dogme-95 movement of cinema, which is more diegetic, is a radically new phase in the history of cinema and is different from the various interesting movements of cinema during the 20th century. Dibakar Banerjee has intelligently blended many significant elements from the Dogma film movement with the realities of contemporaty Indian ethos and has created a provocative movie, which has to be watched by everyone of us. Atleast once!

Movie Rating : 8 out of 10