Despite being warned about the gaze of the makers of Lust Stories 2, I was curious to see what had come of it. After all, this was the franchisee that had given us the memorable snippet of a married woman pleasuring herself with vibrator to an orgasm. How bad could it be?
And thus, my curiosity got the better of me.
The first movie was fairly triggering for me. As an asexual person, it is not that I am repulsed by sex, but I am certainly repulsed by how marriages centre sexual intimacy over any other. While it might seem progressive to have a grandmother (played by Neena Gupta) who brings up sexual compatibility while her granddaughter’s marriage is being arranged, it’s terribly trite. It left me wondering how the two never had a conversation about this before in private, and how strange and intrusive it would be to suddenly bring up such a topic. Besides, she also seems to be driving home the point that sexual pleasure and attraction was at the heart of a marriage, likening it to addiction, doing injustice to several feminist agendas at once. The characters are written poorly and performed with a recklessness that made it very hard for me to take the story seriously. It revealed how little the director seemed to know about such conversations and how they transpired between generations.
This was followed by Konkona Sen’s film, which can best be described as a fetishization of domestic workers – a deeply problematic, casteist gaze that Savarna film-makers somehow seem to think of as pioneering and brave. This time we see Tillotama Shome, infamous for taking on the role of a domestic helper who forges a largely sexual relationship with her employer in Sir, on the other end of the dynamic. The casting could only be brushed off as so much of a coincidence, and goes to show how deeply we fetishize Avarna bodies. Savarna women, repressed by their loyalty to Brahminical patriarchy, crave the erotic freedom and carnal intelligence repeatedly embodied by Avarna women in Lust Stories 2. The ending too felt reductive and overly simplified, as if it were an attempt to write off the power dynamic rife in the plot. If anything, it is Tillotama’s character that is addicted to voyeurism, and that is left unaddressed.
Third came a film by Sujoy Ghosh, starring Vijay Sharma and Tamannaah Bhatia, who play ex-spouses reunited in purgatory. There are repeated shots of Tamannaah’s waist and breasts, and rather predictably, they are in the throes in coitus after some dilly-dallying on her part. Any chemistry observable in the pairing is apparently due to a budding-IRL dynamic between the actors, so it once again felt like unintended voyeurism – this time, it was me, the viewer.
And finally, there is Amit Sharma’s film, starring Kajol. Despite the brief of ‘lust’, the film is steeped in shame and some more fetishization of domestic workers as well as sex workers; the film-makers don’t seem to be able to differentiate between the two occupations. In fact, the movie goes on to promote the stigma around sexually-transmitted disease, correlating it with sex-work as if it were an occupational hazard.
All in all, Lust Stories 2 seems to want to inspire disgust, as an online-friend had tweeted after watching it. In the era of shows like Sex-education (also broadcast on the same OTT, Netflix), this was a seriously regressive and repulsive collection of short films, seemingly resolute in equating lust with violence and the notion of sin.
