I had read an interview recently of the actor Peter Greenaway in The Guardian, where he states that every religion is concerned with death, while art is concerned with life – which is essentially all about sex. How far you agree with him, need not matter here….but Dibakar Banerjee’s LSD (2010) does have sex at its central theme. And some other truths about life.
When I use the word truth, I use it in the sense, that the director or storywriter, would like to present his/her observations of the world around us through their story. It brings to my mind the ever present debate of cinema being an escape from reality or as Slavoj Zizek says, being even more real than reality itself and representing the ultimate truth about life. Think of the most unreal Bollywood film, or television soap..and it will still show you the truth…culturally and socially relevant themes, positive or regressive, made intentionally or unintentionally by the filmmakers.
But is truth stranger than fiction? And how far is the ‘reality’ shown on television really real? That is the underlying message for me in LSD. Cameras are rolling all the time, be it for a student filmmaker (his institute has a very sardonic name that I can’t recall right now), a Hindi TV news sting journalist or a CCTV camera follower in a supermarket. And we in the audience watch their camera footage, through the director’s camera.
True to his style, each one of Banerjee’s characters are so very well etched and rooted. His actors anonymity lends even more credibility to the story. Equally, it is socially relevant to our times, our vouyeristic age of technology coupled with mass media outlets, and their eventual corruption and lies. It is relevant to our social setup, wherein, a father is ready to let his daughter act in a film where she runs away to marry whom she chooses to….but his role as the patriach doesn’t budge outside in the reality away from the film sets. The women are strong, but are duped by their male counterparts be it in a family, a supermarket or a casting couch. The only woman who calls the shots here is the one at the head of a television news channel! It is gritty, funny, sardonic and sad….
For the only two people in this story who apparently love each other, face the worst of what reality can do.
I think LSD is a very important film for Hindi cinema…not just because it is termed as radical (that it talks about sex and is graphic, or uses digital techniques, does away with famous actors etc.) but because it is clever in sending across a message through humour, that what you see is not what you always get. The third eye here or the camera – reveals reality…which can be hyperreal as in the case of reality TV….or it can be an escape from a reality which is essentially cruel to its characters….or there is the reality….of Dibakar Banerjee’s camera itself.
I digress but I can’t help but end with a quote from Michael Haneke: “Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.”
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