Love, Sex Aur Dhokha is a ground-breaking, course redefining, soon-to-be-cult, and eventually historic movie. Right up there, in the league of Dil Chahta Hai.
I say that, because of two reasons – One, that this movie has been made in a manner which is fundamentally different from any movie that you’ve ever seen before.
Dibakar ‘Lucky Khosla’ Banerjee has done away with the very lights-camera-action set up that we know movies by. Instead, he has made it look as if he was filming on third party camera footage – from an overenthusiastic noob movie maker’s hand held camera, from CCTV in a departmental store, and from a sting journalist’s hidden cameras. In this new medium, the screen goes grainy, the camera points at random angles and shows distorted images and sounds at times. These minor irritants are a part of the movie by design. And once you get over them, the director takes over and takes you into his stories. Where people look like you and me and speak our very own lingo without any beep. And you realize that the things which happen to them actually happen to real people in the complex times we live in.
This reality and novelty of the medium adds a further punch to the sharpness of the characters Dibakar has meticulously defined. They’re so real they hit you hard, and are destined to stay with you for a long time. Shruti is hot. Not the Katrina Kaif hot, but the-classmate-you-always-had-a-crush-on hot. Rahul is the chutiya from your colony who somehow got the hottest chick. Rashmi is the poor talented girl whose widowed mother couldn’t get her the best education. These aren’t geniuses or demi-Gods, they are ordinary people. And ordinary people look great on ordinary cameras.
Second reason why this movie is going to be a cult movie is that, it is going to be a huge hit. If the success of Reality TV Shows from MTV Roadies to Splitsvilla to Rakhee ka Swayamvar is anything to go by, the audiences across India are going to lap this movie up. Success will make its idea carry farther and longer.
The possibilities after this are endless. The fact that this 1.5 crore movie is going to earn its producer, the Ekta ‘Saas Bahu formula’ Kapoor, big money is enough for many more film makers to follow in this category. The boldness of this experiment might encourage others to take other daring chances. But what I’m looking for is something even beyond. This movie could do to movie making what blogging did to journalism – democratize it. Now that people have liked a movie shot on cheap cameras, newbie and amateur film makers might start making more movies from hand held cameras like the ones used in LSD. Movies created thus could be distributed over the internet. And in this way, amateur movie makers might start challenging the established movie makers the way bloggers are challenging established journos, thereby raising the abysmal state of the art in our country.
Rating: ****
PS: Those looking for ‘high art’ amidst all this brouhaha over reality, if the mere daring of the filmmaker does not satisfy you, I’d say that the metaphor of shooting a movie with spy cameras whose Tagline is ‘You’re being watched’ is the boldest metaphor I’ve ever come across in any movie.
a hiker on the highway 
Vox Populi