Lust, with much caution

My Mirror column:

A film compendium of four tales promises to unbutton our lustful selves on the Hindi screen, but remains tied up in all sorts of knots.

There’s something a trifle odd about Lust Stories. The film, which premiered on Netflix on June 15, is made up of four stand-alone segments by four different directors — but all united in pursuit of a single theme. The directors are the same as in 2013’s Bombay Talkies: Anurag Kashyap, Karan Johar, Dibakar Banerjee and Zoya Akhtar. There, the unifying theme across segments was the power of cinema. Here, ostensibly, it’s lust.


But here’s the thing: it’s not clear to me that these four tales are really about lust at all. Sex, maybe. Sexual satisfaction, sexual deprivation, sexual confusion, sexual jealousy — all of these are dealt with. And while these might seem to be spin-offs of lust, they do not in themselves constitute it. Whether unabashed or guilt-ridden, lust is a full-bodied, carnal thing. But there is very little sense here of that experience, of coveting and deriving sexual pleasure from another person’s body.

The first segment, directed by Anurag Kashyap, stars Radhika Apte as a married college lecturer called Kalindi, who drunkenly hooks up with her student Tejas (Aakash Thosar, the hero of Sairat) and cannot quite handle the ramifications of the act. Kalindi starts by assuming that the younger, less English-speaking and less sexually experienced Tejas will become besotted with her. But as things begin to pan out rather differently, she gets embroiled in a tangled web not quite of her own weaving.


Apte’s on-the-verge performance is fun to watch: her believable air of manic excess lifts the segment above what otherwise might have felt like a mockery of a character. But we never get the vibe of lust from Tejas and Kalindi, or from Kashyap’s direction. It seems as if both have ticked the mental boxes marked ‘adventure’, ‘older woman’, and ‘younger man’ without the relationship producing the slightest bit of on-screen frisson. There’s only social awkwardness, confused power play and avery predictable jealousy that assumes, if anything, romantic form rather than sexual: the feeling of betrayal comes from having had the same song played to another potential lover.
The second segment is a finely wrought one and Zoya Akhtar’s opening sequence does come close to a portrait of mutual lustfulness. The master and the maid we meet mid-coitus look exhilarated. In that moment of pleasure at least, the hierarchies of who must serve and who must be serviced are apparently transcended. Bhumi Pednekar’s superb Sudha is neither put-upon nor coy, and to be lusted after by her upper middle class employer gives her a little licence, social leeway she would not otherwise have. But the intimacy of lust has clear limits, Akhtar seems to suggest, as she delivers Sudha and us, within just a few minutes, from the edge of an illusory domestic fantasy back into the ‘real world’ of marital alliances — where lust is trained to toe the line of social and economic order. What we experience with any degree of depth is not Sudha’s (or her employer Ajit’s) desire, but its erasure into an almost inevitable sense of melancholy.

The third segment, directed by Dibakar Banerjee, deals in another kind of socially censured attraction, that between a man and his best friend’s wife. Again, though, the scenario Banerjee sets up is by no means one of frenetic, passionate or even zestful attraction. In fact, when we meet Reena (Manisha Koirala in a perfectly cast and perfectly pitched performance) and Sudhir (Jaideep Ahlawat), the vibe between them is so comfortable as to make them seem like a long-time couple. They have tea together in a lawn, they lie in bed reading and chatting without any sign of sexual frisson — so much so that when it turns out they’re having an affair, it’s a surprise.

I’m not suggesting that lustful sex must be signposted as something unadulterated by other emotions, separate from loving sex, but surely what Banerjee’s film is concerned with is the breakdown of a marital relationship and the need for emotional intimacy and connection as much as to be physically desired? Both the times that we see sex here, there are tears in one person’s eyes. This is scarcely lustful sex. It might be comfort sex or pity sex, or even intense emotional sex, which is fine. But why then suggest we’re watching a film about lust?

The last segment, directed by Karan Johar, changes the tone of the film. From the realist, often sombre relationship dramas created by the other three directors, Johar transports us into his universe of campy, comic excess. But he addresses the question of lust more directly. An all-girls’ school serves as the setting for a romp with a programmatic message about female pleasure. His characters are ridiculous but entertaining. There’s Neha Dhupia as the cleavage-revealing, divorcee sex goddess teacher (slyly named Rekha); Kiara Advani as Megha, her younger colleague, a virginal-looking bride with non-virginal desires she is keen to fulfil; and Vicky Kaushal as her besotted and good-looking but hopelessly bad-in-bed husband.

Looking at the hilariously performative, uber-vocal female masturbation scene(s) in Johar’s segment and earlier in Veere di Wedding, it looks like broad comedy is the register in which Bollywood has decided to present us with the female orgasm. That’s a good enough place to start. It might, however, be a bit of a tragic joke that so many of these lustful heterosexual women are lusting after vibrators — not men.


Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1 July 2018.