The four directors this time are Vikramaditya Motwane, Kiran Rao, Shakun Batra, and Vishal Bhardwaj. The four stories focus on female friendships, deceit and manipulation, the language of words versus the language of sex, and what women really want in bed. The quality varies across the episodes, but there’s always something quirky or interesting or something that makes you stop and think. For me, Shakun Batra’s installment worked the best. Which one was your favourite? As for performances, Konkona Sen Sharma and Sana Thampi really stand out. That’s the basic storyline and the quick review. A longer analysis follows, and it may contain a few minor spoilers.
A casual dictionary search for “lust” gives us two meanings. The first one is strong sexual desire – and yes, the episodes in Lust Stories 3 do have this element. But what the four directors explore is also the second meaning of the word, which is a very strong desire to have or get something. Vikramaditya Motwane’s segment, for instance, is about the desire for sexual adventure. It features two couples. Radhika Apte and Vijay Varma play Padma and Hemant. Konkona Sen Sharma plays Padma’s office colleague and neighbour and friend, Shonali, and she’s married to Debu, played by Abhishek Banerjee. In both marriages, sex is no longer what it used to be. In the case of Padma and Hemant, she is addicted to K-dramas and he is addicted to reels. When we have machines to give us company, does human intimacy become a casualty? In a lovely scene, Padma and Hemant are in bed at night. She turns and looks at him, tentatively reaching out to touch him. He is laughing at his reels. She decides now is not the time. She turns to the other side to go to sleep. And that’s when he turns to look at her. It’s a case of missed connections.
You could ask why they don’t just talk things out. But sometimes, it’s not that easy, especially for conservative middle-class people. And so Shonali suggests something wild to Padma, something to spice up their respective sex lives. What if they swapped husbands! One of the most interesting images in this episode comes after this suggestion. Padma, from her balcony, keeps staring at Debu, who is standing in the open area between flats. It makes you wonder about housing colonies. How many unfulfilled women are checking out other women’s husbands, and how many unfulfilled men must be looking at other men’s wives! This episode comes in two flavours. One part of the Padma-Shonali story tries to be a giddy sex farce, and this does not work. The dialogues and the events try too hard to put a wink-wink feel into the proceedings. Konkona is very good as someone whose idea of sexual adventurousness comes from TV shows and whose desperation comes from her innate inability to be that “cool”. But the things her character does do not land with the intended effect.
The other flavour is serious. It’s about the bond between Shonali and Padma, and this is the stuff that really works. When Padma does something devious, Shonali is angry, but slowly she realises why Padma did what she did and the two women come to a truce. This female-friendship is important. All four episodes speak strongly about women. In this episode, for instance, Shonali and Padma talk about how they got married when they were expected to and had children when they were expected to, and now it is time to focus on their needs without feeling guilty. Vishal Bhardwaj’s episode, with Aditi Rao Hydari and Siddharth, talks about what it would be like if you looked inside the heads of the demure women from the old-time Muslim socials of Hindi cinema and found that these women didn’t just want to be wooed with poetry, they also wanted to be subjected to moves from porn.
Vishal sets his story in Hyderabad, which gives him a brand new dialect to play word-games with, and the colour red is everywhere. It’s on the roses on the blanket on the couple’s bed. It’s in the sheer curtains through which a very game Siddharth unclothes himself as a sex object. His character’s name is Badru, and his wife is Saira. He is a doctor. She is a literature professor whose classroom is filled with hormonal girls whose heads are being filled with imagery from Mills & Boon-type novels. Life is all good, but Saira, increasingly, begins to want more in bed than Badru’s usual quick thrusts and a climax, which is charmingly called “manzil”. The Hindi-Urdu language can really make things sound elegant. Imagine the phrase “razaai mein ghuske ungli hilaana” in English. As the likes of Manto proved, even explicit things can become literature. Saira sets out on a secret adventure that brings her shame, at first, and then brings her to her… manzil in exactly the ways she always wanted.
This episode plays like a literary Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, with a Badru from Saira’s dreams and a Badru from real life. We see both sides of the sexual situation. A woman is not like a lightbulb. She is not something that can be switched on and off. She is like a candle, something that melts slowly with heat. But then, unless a woman says what she wants, how does the man know how to make her melt? There are no such issues in Kiran Rao’s episode, with Gurfateh Pirzada and the fantastic Sana Thampi, which talks about how desire can be used by both men and women as a tool for manipulation. The sex, here, is explicitly from porn. He is the proverbial pizza delivery guy. And the first time he sees her, she is sucking on a lollipop. He is Karan. She is a nail artist named Lisa. When she looks up his Instagram account, her eyes linger on his shirtless pictures.
Kiran’s filmmaking is exquisite. In the opening shot, we see a road filled with traffic, until one bike makes a turn and we begin to follow its journey. This is Karan’s bike, and we get the feeling that we are being asked to follow this one “lust story” among many. In another memorable image, Karan and Lisa kiss with the Mumbai skyline in the far distance. Throughout this story about two people, we are never allowed to forget the city around them – a city of opportunity, and also a city of opportunists where no one can be trusted. I liked the way Kiran brings a noir feel to what looked like just a cross-culture lust story. The body has needs, yes. But lust alone isn’t enough to live. You need other things. Shakun Batra, in his episode, says the same thing. Lust alone isn’t enough. But he says it very interestingly, and he says it with the most interesting premise in the anthology.
Ali Fazal and Radhika Madan play Varun and Sailee, who are first seen entering a divorce court. There are reminders of couplehood all around. A newly married man and woman are seen in court. There’s an advertisement banner for diamonds that targets couples. As Varun and Sailee go through the waiting period for their divorce, they fight a lot. They fight about physical things, like who gets to have a painting. They fight about intangible things, like his saviour complex. But when they have sex, everything else disappears. It’s just one big dopamine hit, as a character describes it. The film examines what it means to be two bodies thrashing about in lust, versus what it means when those two bodies belong to two people in a marriage, which means that the lust comes with a side of mother-in-law issues and the fact that one of you is a romantic who writes handwritten letters and other one thinks gift-giving is basically ordering something on Amazon.
Shakun is basically trying to make sense of a contradiction that exists between Varun and Sailee, and maybe one that many of us have seen, too. The language of sex is different from the language of words. When you talk, you can sometimes create a situation that ruins the peace. But there’s something very pure about the primal language of grunts and moans. It is a basic animal need, which is uncomplicated by emotions that cause friction between humans. Varun and Sailee find that they communicate best in the language of sex. But is that enough to sustain a marriage, even one at the brink of a divorce? Very briefly, we get to examine the marriages of Varun’s parents, who come from a less complicated time when you stayed married to someone without thinking about things like individual happiness. With Sailee’s parents, something else happened. Of all the episodes in the anthology, this one is the least dependent on plot and therefore the most effective in conveying abstractions like feelings and emotions and love and lust. When Sailee uses Varun’s bathroom, she leaves her hairband behind. It’s as though she wants some part of her to still be with him. That’s the thing about lust. These complications cease to exist.
