Netflix film Lust Stories 2 review: Konkona Sen Sharma and Amit Sharma save the day

The cast of Lust Stories 2 includes Vijay Varma (above), Amruta Subhash, Angad Bedi, Kajol, Kumud Mishra, Mrunal Thakur, Neena Gupta, Tamannaah Bhatia and Tillotama Shome. (Screen grab/Netflix)

In a scene from Netflix’s Lust Stories 2, Neena Gupta, playing an outspoken grandmother, tells her granddaughter matter-of-factly “saath wahi log rehte hain jinka sex best hoga.” It’s the kind of sex-talk you’d expect married but despondent couples to indulge in while vacationing in edgy tourist countries. It takes a village, sometimes an entire country with the reputation of unguarded morality, to usher us to a point where even talking about sex doesn’t feel like a cultural insurrection. Which is why it makes perfect sense, at least on paper, to commission an anthology like Lust Stories - a thorny bouquet of stories that foregrounds primal instinct, without the caveat of moralizing it. And yet, this second edition of an anthology that sparkled with promise the first time around, is a colossal, at times puzzling misfire.

Streaming anthologies have always been a mixed bag. Irrespective of the platform – Netflix or Prime Video – rarely has an assembly of stories managed to impress as a collective. There is probably an economic rationale behind continuing with them. Diversity and demographics can be touched upon at a fraction of the cost through a format that might also appeal to those who simply can’t summon marathon hours from their lives to dedicate to the punch-drunk high of binge-watching (kind of contradictory to the streaming model itself). But something’s clearly working even though not much is. This time around, R. Balki, Konkona Sen Sharma, Sujoy Ghosh and Amit Sharma are part of the choir, trying to whisper into the ears of a reluctant republic aphorisms about the carnal nature of attraction. The fact that we are the most populated country in the world, sort of, carries its own irony here.

The four stories train their eyes on sex as taboo, as trauma, as violence and in the rare case, as a form of bodily expression. Balki’s story about a filter-less grandmother trying to have ‘the talk’ with her granddaughter, is so clunky and blunt in its language, it echoes the depthless origin of a dart aiming for the widest circle of obviousness. Casting Neena Gupta as the taboo-busting truth-teller is no inspired casting choice. Wasting her though, kind of is. Sujoy Ghosh’s film featuring Vijay Varma and Tamanaah Bhatia now carries an air of surrealism, as the prologue to a love story that has already landed on the media’s pages. Varma, a habitual cheater, finds himself in a strange village, after his car meets with an accident. It’s a half-decent ruse to pull in the standard Ghosh twist, but you can see it coming from a distance. Strangely, the dialogue, quite simply struggles to support a premise that could have extracted something more wicked if not effective.
Amit Sharma’s film, the last of the batch, sort of makes up for all the frivolous, wasteful performances of the rest. Set in the 90s, in a far-off desert village, it stars Kumud Mishra, as the last kin of a kingdom in decline. Poisonous, sleazy and a repeat sexual offender, Mishra is terrifying on his top game. Opposite him, Kajol, as a former prostitute rescued from a life of selling flesh, to now somewhat bartering her soul, is decent as well. She wants to put her son through a good college, while Mishra goes around haranguing random women- including his wife- for indecent, sexual favours. Though Sharma’s film hinges on a late twist as well, it is perhaps the most ambitious of the pack and marries stunning visual imagery to a suffocating preamble. The idea that a woman who used to trade her body might feel caged in marriage than she is in a brothel is disquietingly spelled out.

The second film of the ensemble, directed by Konkona Sen Sharma, is easily the most interesting of the lot. It’s also the only film that wants to interpret lust literally, but not without the layering of class and gender. Tillotoma Shome plays an independent woman living by herself in the city, who catches her house help, played emphatically well by Amruta Subhash, having sex on her bed. Appalled at first, Shome’s character finds herself enjoying the voyeuristic pleasure of peeking at the two. The house help, on the other hand, is merely borrowing the luxury of space, available so scarcely for the people of Mumbai, as a conduit to her sexual expression. Push comes to shove, however, as the two unleash and uncover things about each other that maybe only they - two women accessing pleasure through unconventional means - can understand. It’s a lovely, if vaguely provocative arc that though it borrows from a sleazy pornographic trope, tries to at least peel its superficiality to extract something purposeful. It’s risky, but Sen pulls it off for the sake of the anthology.

It’s bizarre that no one across the two seasons of this anthology series has attempted a coming-of-age story, a moody teenage film that focuses on a bracket that screams lust and perversion. That would, however, imply the re-framing of intimacy to a brand-new grammar, the kind we are yet as a cinema to invent. Lust Stories looks like the risk-free space to do that and yet the collective will to ambush a bodily function with the stained, anthropological mind-set of dread and dreariness is frankly baffling. Only Sen manages to poke beneath the surface and some more. Or else Lust Stories can start to feel like a place where lust, love and just about any carnal fantasy goes to die.

Lust Stories 2 dropped on Netflix on June 26, 2023.