The four short stories in Lust Stories 3 revolve around female desire, though only one of them comes close to capturing that heated, erotic passion with any real stylistic flair. It's somewhat shocking to find filmmakers like Vikramaditya Motwane and Kiran Rao, who have at least shown glimpses of their true potential in otherwise flawed works like Black Warrant, CTRL, and Laapataa Ladies, stumble so terribly in their respective films in this anthology. Though, on the other hand, they make one good decision: filming their work with a light, comical touch, which makes it easy to slot their stories as "disposable, mechanical work done for the sake of money."
It's Motwane's film that opens this anthology, in which two neighbors-cum-best friends, Padma (Radhika Apte) and Shonali (Konkona Sen Sharma), decide to swap partners after getting tired of their barren sex lives. Meaning: Shonali will sleep with Padma's husband, Hemant (Vijay Varma), and Padma will sleep with Shonali's husband, Debendu (Abhishek Banerjee). The women are inspired by a Korean show in which the two protagonists, similarly frustrated with their sex lives, decide to swap partners to spice up their lives. In a nice, amusing touch, the Korean show is dubbed in Hindi, and when Padma and Shonali imagine meeting the two protagonists, the TV characters seem to be speaking in dubbed voices.
Padma initially hesitates to go along with the plan. She asserts that she doesn't want to spoil her relationship with Shonali. And yet, Padma quickly warms up to Debendu and grows closer to him, while Shonali struggles to get intimate with Hemant, though only because of a lie. Padma tells Shonali that Hemant loves listening to Hindi ghazals, which proves to be false information and leads to a crack in Shonali and Padma's relationship. This "crack," however, is slight. Instead of bitter confrontations, all it yields are minor conflicts that neither register nor sting. The whole short film has the feel of something insubstantial and fluffy.
The one memorable image, I guess, comes courtesy of Debendu and Padma as they struggle to take off their clothes in their excitement and haste. If nothing else, Motwane at least knows how fake the "smoothness" of the pre-sex stripping found in most movies is. The actual act is, in fact, quite awkward and clumsy. It involves its share of fumbling and stumbling. This is the only thing Motwane gets right in his story.
The second story in the anthology is directed by Kiran Rao, and it's about twin brothers and drug dealers named Karan and Arjun (Gurfateh Pirzada in a dual role) who, unbeknownst to each other, start sleeping with the same girl: Lisa, a nail artist played by Sana Thampi. It's somewhat hilarious to compare Poonam Mathur's mother to Rakhee Gulzar's in the 1995 Karan Arjun, given that her good-for-nothing sons are no saviors or revenants seeking revenge. But Rao's story is more about how women see more than the men around them, which gives them an advantage in manipulating those men for their own benefit. What's more, the "message" arrives in the form of a neat twist that's anyway just fine because the whole story is constructed like a lightweight game of deception that's more digestible than substantial, more "gotcha!" than noteworthy.
I would go as far as to say that the twist is the sole highlight of Rao's story. Remove it, and it becomes unremarkable erotic trash with a sprinkling of thriller elements that are simply perfunctory. Even the sex, filmed like a low-rent softcore wannabe, looks more imitative than sexy. But hey, at least it seems Rao was smiling throughout the filming of the movie. At least, someone had a good time with it.
The third short film, directed by Shakun Batra, is the worst of this anthology. As in Gehraiyaan, Batra once again tries so strenuously to make a Great Movie that he doesn't even manage to make one worth watching. The short opens with that overused cliche of cutting from a wedding day to the divorce day, though this time you don't really wonder what happened in between. Batra also isn't able to resist underlining his points with shots as lame as the one of a wedding couple ascending the stairs just when Varun (Ali Fazal) and Sailee (Radhika Madan) are descending, and dialogues as lame as the one where Sailee tells Varun how she was hiding the chaos and garbage bins in Paris to capture photos of the place as she imagined it to be through various movies.
One gets the sense that the couple married on the basis of ideas fed to them by their parents and society, only to realize that marriage is not what it's hyped up to be. But Batra films the drama without vigor or personality. His images are plain and polished and thus contradict the messy nature of the relationship he is tackling.
Like Sailee, Batra, too, hides the garbage and the chaos from his frames—or rather, provides them with an uber-cool polish that makes the urban spaces, be it Varun's apartment or a therapy office, look like lived-in selfie spots. Then there are shots like the one inside a car with an oily yellow outside (it's raining), or the one where the couple is lying on the floor, with her on the right, her head on a pillow, a glass and a bowl at her side, and him on the left in a slanting position, his leg extending downward and his head turned toward Sailee. Everything and everyone is carefully arranged like a showpiece. Or take the shot where the couple is in a restaurant bathed in purple and pink. These images look more like mood boards than scenes.
The only "character" that the short has is the performances of Fazal and Madan, who constantly find notes of honesty in their lines and scenes. Thanks to them, Batra's short looks respectable and deserving of some merit, but it would have worked better as a feature, with more details and more inner life. In its current version, the short film is more akin to drama lite. It's forgettable; it's prosaic.
"Prosaic" is a word one cannot apply to the fourth film—the best of the lot—directed by Vishal Bhardwaj, who shows his colleagues what they are missing, namely, a distinct style. I am a fan of this new Bhardwaj; he dares to fly high with his eccentric filmmaking. It's the kind of filmmaking that observes the ordinary with an individualistic eye. If Motwane, Rao, and Batra approach sex scenes conventionally, Bhardwaj finds new ways to film sex by elevating the very act to his level of eccentricity.
When Saira (Aditi Rao Hydari) and Badru (Siddharth) do their Friday-night "ritual" on the bed, Bhardwaj's camera sees them one at a time. It alternates between shots of Saira on the bed and Badru on top of her, simultaneously talking and humping. This "separation" amusingly accentuates the vast difference between the way Badru and Saira experience sex. He quickly reaches orgasm, while she's left dissatisfied. Bhardwaj extends his quirkiness to the performances as well, and Siddharth and Hydari wonderfully attune their performances to the beats of the overall aesthetic.
Hydari's exaggerated expressions look so innately beautiful and funny that you respond to her with "sweet smiles." You love it when she gets turned on while reading spicy lines or when she expresses shame upon reading those very lines. Hydari makes shyness look appealingly quirky. It's hard not to be pleased. And Siddharth is hilarious as a hunky version of Badru who emerges from the mind of a Saira desperate to be sexually satiated and satisfied. Together, Siddharth and Hydari present themselves as live-action cartoons, which suits Bhardwaj's kooky style.
The one thing Bhardwaj's short lacks is a strong story. His goofiness is in service of a mild narrative that doesn't stick. It's good to see Bhardwaj experimenting with his visuals, though I did wish he had also paid more attention to what he's saying. Without solid hooks, the short seems in danger of sliding off the screen. What holds it together are Bhardwaj's playful touch and the performances of the leads.
Still, what this filmmaker succeeds in offering turns out to be more rewarding than the empty calories of the other shorts in this anthology. Sure, Bhardwaj might not have fully triumphed. But, for what it's worth, he straps on his wings and displays a zeal to go big or die trying. If that's not ambition, I don't know what is.
Final Score - [5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
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Publisher at Midgard Times