“I Still Get to Say What I Want to Say,” says Dibakar Banerjee

HIS THERAPIST HAS told him he is a risk addict. And that the only way he can deal with it is by jumping into the void.

So, what does Dibakar Banerjee do after making Sandeep aur Pinky Faraar, a brilliant psychological thriller that was released immediately after Covid-19 in 2021 with little fanfare and even less impact? And after spending the following two years making Tees, about three generations of a Kashmiri Muslim family that finds itself being erased, only to see its release being blocked by Netflix?

He heeds Ektaa Kapoor’s call to collaborate on a sequel to their clut­ter-breaking LSD: Love, Sex aur Dhokha (LSD) in 2010 and starts working on a sequel in the post-truth, post-OTT and post-pandemic universe.

The result is a gobsmacking smorgasbord of the many alternative univers­es we are currently living in. LSD 2: Love, Sex aur Dhokha 2 tracks three parallel stories. One is about a transgender actor who has entered a reality show to pay for an anatomical change. The second is about a transgender janitor who is seemingly brutally raped, after five semen samples are found on her, and the third is about a foul-mouthed gamer with six million followers who becomes a fan favourite after a sex act is accidentally live streamed. The question before him is whether he should identify with the image his fans have of him, or be who he is. Moreover, is he sure of who he is?

But then identity is the big ques­tion in Banerjee’s film that combines handheld camerawork with deepfakes, facial animation, an AI sequence, and even characters inside the metaverse. “It is brasher, louder, more colourful, and visually crazier than LSD,” says Banerjee. Like all his films, it is not overt­ly political, yet it manages to say a lot about the country we are living in, with its many parallel worlds. If there is one universe in which India is a powerful global force, there is equally another in which the country is struggling under the weight of its unfulfilled aspirations. LSD2 shows us a different version of youth from the aspirational strugglers of Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s recent hit, 12th Fail. Banerjee’s world has no nobil­ity. It is a world of Bigg Boss contestants, barely legal gamers, fluid sexual identi­ties, and venal personal relationships. No one is clean, everyone has an agenda.

For Banerjee the choice has always been clear. After the dejection and rejection he faced for Sandeep aur Pinky Faraar, he went into therapy to under­stand himself. He realised that he had to go back to who he was when he first en­tered the film industry with the plucky Khosla ka Ghosla! (2006). “I knew I was walking on thin ice, struggling with deep and existential issues. Who sees a movie, who is allowed to see it? These are political questions,” he says.

SO WHILE HE has not lost the essence of who he is as a person and as a filmmaker, he has returned to the age of low production budgets (so much so that he had to pitch in with his own money to bring the film to the table) and no PR budget, not even for a hoarding. “We don’t even have money for T-shirts,” he says with a laugh. “I have one T-shirt which I had to wear two days in a row for marketing events.” With barely any stars in the movie, he is the face of the movie. “And that is scary,” he says, “given that I am 53, balding, bearded and surreptitious looking. The only reason we’re getting a theatrical release is Ektaa’s goodwill.” She has a subversive, dark side, he says of Kapoor, who produced LSD and its sequel. “And ideologically, she is non-binary, just like I am,” he adds.

Laughter in the face of disaster is his response to shrinking spaces for self-expression, a tactic fine-tuned over his many movies. It started with his first movie, where a middle-class family re­sponds with an elaborately constructed fraud to con the conman. Khosla ka Gho­sla! was based in Delhi, the city where he grew up, and returned to after dropping out of the National Institute of Design to work in advertising. It brought him to Mumbai, where he continued with the triumph of the little guy in a system that is stacked against him. In 2008’s Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, Lucky (Abhay Deol who played the real-life thief Bunty Chor), is just one tiny cog in the wheel of careless capitalism, silently and efficiently ridding middle-class families of their excessive possessions, from TVs to jewellery. Its theme song symbolised the post liberalisation noughties: “CCTV chai­da mainu, LCD bhi chaida main/ Lal Murseri chaida mainu, Lal Kila bhi chaida mainu (I want a colour TV, an LCD TV, I want a red Mercedes and the Red Fort).”

LSD came in 2010 and reflected the darker edges of an increasingly unequal society with its stories of an honour killing, an MMS scandal and a sting, all of which were emblematic of the time. With its raw and raunchy attitude, it made people sit up and pay attention. Shanghai (2012) again explored the battle of the little people against the big corpo­rations. As the political activist played by Prosenjit Chatterjee says in the film so accurately: “They will take the land of your ancestors and then employ you as slaves in the malls and factories that come up there.”

Banerjee is forever curious about the world, society, and relationships. He is also collaborative. Shubham, the co-writer of LSD2 and of Eeb Allay Ooo (2019) the film that drew Banerjee’s at­tention, says the filmmaker expects the co-writers to get involved in everything from shot taking to the way they see the film. “If he is making a drastic change in the film, he will always ask us. He doesn’t come with the baggage of his past work. He is very democratic. That is a very rare quality for a director like him. We were aware we were entering a sensitive area and our ideas of the world are vastly different. But we were trying to integrate it into a single canvas. What was important for me was that I wanted to take risks, visually, with the sound, with the characters, and the concept. We are in a very complicated time and telling stories like this is complicated.”

Shubham’s co-writer and director of Eeb Allay Ooo, Prateek Vats, agrees: “The writing process was rigorous and all of us tried to arrive at a common language without erasing our personal styles. It wasn’t always easy but quite rewarding and fulfilling.” Banerjee was more than willing to meet them halfway or farther.

So is there a place for Banerjee in the industry as it is, caught between big budget tentpole movies and middle-of-the-road streaming movies and series? Yes, as there is for that other teller of stark stories, Anurag Kashyap.

“The industry is not stupid. It has a small space for madness and in its search for credibility it will always give space to the kind of thing I do. I am cheap, I take on risks by becoming a co-producer, and am willing to absorb financial losses. They know I will die trying to make the movie I want to. So I will be tolerated,” says Banerjee, who says on LSD2 he was most conscious of keeping in mind the CBFC, the music company, and the financiers. “My biggest joy is subverting the romantic song by picturising it on the lowest of the low as it were.”

BANNERJEE’S WORLDVIEW IS not judgemental. Manu Rishi Chadha who wrote the dialogues of Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, apart from acting in it, says: “When I asked Dibakar why do you want to create a hero who is a thief in your film, he said: ‘Mujhe bahut tasty kahaani lagti hai iski (I find it a very tasty story).’ Dibakar’s connection with him was his pain. Ek chor ne achchi zindagi jeene ki koshish ki aur usse har rishte ne dhokha diya (A thief tried to live a stylish life but everyone in his life let him down).”

Banerjee has always had a strong sense of characterisation in his movies. Parvin Dabas, his leading man in Khosla ka Ghosla!, says: “He is able to create di­verse characters and give each of them a life. He spends a lot of time and attention on each character. His understanding of the human condition is very detailed. It elevates his movies.”

And the movies continuously elevate him, whether it is the online acceptance of Sandeep aur Pinky Faraar, the cult status of Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! (2015) or the posterity of Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!. “I’m not complain­ing,” says Banerjee, who famously returned his National Award in 2015 in protest against the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan as chairman of The Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune. “I still get to say what I want to say,” he adds.

“My life has taught me to not accept much, and then things happen,” he says.

He’s hanging on by the skin of his teeth, but he has no intention of going anywhere without sinking his teeth into telling us the juiciest stories of his time, our time. Dark, dangerous and dis­turbing they may be, they exist because they echo reality.

BollywoodcinemaDibakar BanerjeeEeb Allay OooKhosla Ka GhoslaLSD 2: LoveSex aur Dhokha 2