Lust Stories and OTTs: When sex is about a bra size, it’s sexism, not sex

Tamannaah Bhatia and Vijay Varma in a still from 'Lust Stories 2'.

Netflix’s second installment of Lust Stories is musty — kind of goes with the current Mumbai monsoons. Except, the rains unfailingly give us some joy — at least, when its advent is later-than-usual, and for a few days.

Three out of four films in Lust Stories 2 are such exasperating drudgery that lust, a primal impulse, is neither fun nor provocative to watch. The films by Sujoy Ghosh and Amit Ravindernath Sharma go beyond plain dullness to another plane overused in the worst of Bollywood — gratuitous show of male predatory instincts and the obsession with women’s breasts. But the vacuity of these stories aren’t as much in the cleavage close-ups (a male character in Sujoy Ghosh’s film even peers into the label of a red any bra, while the camera zooms in to the “36 DD” written on it), as it is in their witless and imbecilic narratives.

A grandmother’s excessive concern over her granddaughter’s sexual compatibility with her to-be husband is an unintentionally hilarious spectacle in R Balki’s story which begins the anthology. Neena Gupta, wasted and conveniently placed in her liberated-after-midlife pigeonhole; Mrunal Thakur as granddaughter and her fiancé (Angad Bedi), moronic post-millennial stereotypes — together they drive a story that turns lust and sex into a set of prescriptions for a long-lasting marriage — “You will, at least, come back to each other if the sex is good.” Which century was this script mid-wived in? The grandmother here, I am assuming, is supposed to be suffering not from a cognitive disorder, but from a case of being so progressive that she is a motormouth and Mahinder Watsa’s as-yet undiscovered twin.

Neena Gupta, Angad Bedi and Mrunal Thakur in a still from 'Lust Stories 2'.

Ghosh’s story — a pulpy crime thriller kind of nightmare tale about a sexual encounter with the past — has actor Vijay Varma in yet another misogynistic psychopath’s role, and Tamannaah Bhatia trying her best to fit into the film’s breast-obsessed narrative.

In Sharma’s story set in a feudal time capsule of Uttar Pradesh, Kajol plays the abused and brutalised wife of an alcoholic sex fiend and Kumud Mishra, in the husband’s role, plays it like Shakti Kapoor with subtle grins. Here too, the camera over-enthusiastically pries down a woman’s blouse over and over again.

In the anthology’s only assured and crafty story, Tillotama Shome and Amruta Subhash play house-owner and house-help/cook who inadvertently become sexual allies without being involved with each other sexually or romantically. The story, directed by Konkona Sen Sharma (and written by her and Pooja Tolani), portrays sex as sensual desire as well as a function of class, politics, identity and social roles.

Amruta Subhash in a still from 'Lust Stories 2'.

This is the second time Sen Sharma’s invested in a character so distressingly yet eloquently balanced in the interstices of sexuality and class. The first was as an actor in her luminous portrayal of Bharti Mandal in a story, Geeli Pucchi, directed by Neeraj Ghaywan in Netflix’s thematic anthology Ajeeb Daastaans (2021). Bharti was a gamechanger as far as sexual diversity goes in the Indian OTT universe.

Konkona Sen Sharma and Aditi Rao Hydari in Neeraj Ghaywan-directed 'Geeli Pucchi' from 'Ajeeb Daastaans' (2021).

The world has othered Bharti, a Bengali Dalit queer factory worker somewhere in Uttar Pradesh. The overwhelmingly male work force at the factory resents her; the managerial job she covets eludes her. With an imploding anger, self-bulldozing her way to survive, Bharti  is attracted to women and explores her sexuality without trepidation or shame. Ghaywan places Bharti, and her sexual and caste identity in India’s historical fault-lines — a rarity even in shows coming out of countries where sexual openness has existed for much longer than in our society. Sen Sharma’s directorial in Lust Stories 2 is lust through the prism of the personal as well as social — a classic tight narrative leading up to a moment of high-drama, unfolding in a very Indian context.

Tillotama Shome in a still from 'Lust Stories 2'.

Sex is also the current Hollywood appetite. The rom-com is lame, and the sex comedy as post-millennial and Gen-Z women see it, is the bent. In No Hard Feelings, which released in Indian theatres on June 23, Jennifer Lawrence plays a financially strapped Uber driver who agrees, for a fee, to seduce the awkward teenage son of a wealthy New York couple. Asian American women created Joyride, releasing in the US on July 7, in which Everything Everywhere All at Once star Stephanie Hsu lead a loose foursome to China on a journey of friendship and self-discovery, breaking several dozen rules about drug use and sex along the way. Bottoms (in American theatres on August 25) has been described as “a queer Gen-Z twist on the classic high school virginity tale”. Two teenage lesbians start a fight club to woo the cheerleaders of their dreams. Intentional libidinous goof with political undertones is a Hollywood trend this summer.

In the OTT world, the sex is taken for granted. Given the cornucopia, Lust Stories 2 is an antiquated outlier — Bollywood style. In course of the last decade, streaming has shattered and redefined our taste for sex positivity. Not only are teenagers and adults both having lots of sex on our TV screens, often sex in OTT shows is transactional and utilitarian playing into the woke obsession with work-family “balance,” — less fun, less raw, lee unpredictable, but lots of it, from Masters of Sex on Amazon Prime to documentaries like Love, Sex and Goop on Netflix. The Gen-Z teenager and new adult, say many studies from the past few years, is having far less sex than earlier generations. They have more caution than most generations in the last five decades. But in India, things are a bit different.

MediAngels.com, a Mumbai-based e-healthcare company funded by  the Union government, concluded in a study conducted this year on the sex life of Indian teenagers that the new average age of first sexual encounter in India is 13 years for boys and 14 years for girls. Since the beginning of the 2000s, several studies and real-life experience prove that the teen sexual revolution is reaching its peak in India. A show like Lust Stories 2 is blatantly off-kilter on the pulse. Ashim Ahluwalia’s Class on Netflix, an adaptation of the Spanish series Elite, streaming on Netflix since February this year, had something to say about this revolution. But otherwise we are still a filmmaking culture that needs an anthology dedicated to lust and sex to regurgitate old ways of looking at sexual desire. The first Lust Stories released on Netflix exactly five years age was a cautious foray into the world of stories about sexual desire. The second anthology, barring the saving force by Sen Sharma, Shome and Subhash, is far worse in both storytelling and theme.

So far, in the Indian OTT world, a truly liberated sexual being or a sexual relationship is rare. The bisexual Punjabi woman having a behind-doors relationship with a movie star in Four More Shots 2 was an aberration. Granular, authentic exploration of the flights and dangers of sexual desire is uncharted territory in Bollywood, which overwhelmingly feeds every major OTT. Making a film that delves into the complexities of a romantic-sexual adult equation are also hard to sell to OTTs unless there is a star attached to a project. And Indian stars don’t do much sex. Himanshu Malik, producer, writer and director of Chitrakut, a film about two adult relationships that released in theatres in 2022 and is now on JioCinema, says that having grown up on the happy-ever-afters of Yash Chopra and Bollywood in general, Malik wanted stay true to the idea he started his script with: Relationships are not happy-ever-after. But there’s something true and transformative about every relationship. He has been trying to sell a script which hinges around obsessive love and sex between two consenting adults called Noble Savage for many years now.

'Gandi Baat' Season 5 poster.

Homegrown soft-porn channels make sex a selling point in shoddily-produced, low budget dramas, some of which touch on age-old prejudices about sex in India. Mastram in MX Player ran for a long haul only to be nixed after a tussle between its producer and the platform MX Player. Fuh se Fantasy on Voot is again cheaply-filmed sexual experimentation. Virgin Bhaskar on Zee5 is about a 26-year-old virgin who has authored several erotic novels but is struggling to find a partner for his own unfulfilled fantasies. Apps like Ullu create content that replicate the ‘women-with-big-breasts-titillate-us’ blueprint with shows that have the same old gaze on heterosexual desire.

Lust Stories 2 is close to an Ullufication for Netflix. And it won’t go down well, at least, among urban Indians, for whom back-to-back catch-up of a great OTT show produced anywhere in the world is like an erotic longing all by itself. We’ve seen a lot of great sex and great love, don’t give us sexism and lectures.