There was a time during the Covid-19 lockdowns when a new anthology of shorts would drop on a streaming platform every second week. While we understood the logistical challenges of producing full-length features, and the urgent need to keep churning out ‘content,’ the anthology fatigue was real. Bad habits crept into both sides. Box-of-chocolates storytelling became competitive film-making. Viewers and critics entered an endless loop of comparing segments; most anthologies were reduced to internal rankings. The format burned itself out and culminated in the release of the utterly forgettable Lust Stories 2 (2023), a limp post-pandemic sequel to a frisky pre-pandemic franchise.
But distance makes the heart grow fonder. It’s almost nostalgic to watch Lust Stories 3, the latest quartet of shorts from a foursome of established Hindi film directors. For one, it reclaims the diversity of desire in a culture notorious for treating sex as an exotic and banned drug. Lust is framed as a middle-class construct (Vikramaditya Motwane), a weapon (Kiran Rao), a medicine (Shakun Batra), and a language (Vishal Bhardwaj). It’s unlike other thematic assortments, in the sense that there is no standout or weak segment. Each one feels like a different organ, and when stitched together, they make up a body that excavates the shaky bridge between love and libido.
Motwane’s segment, which plays first, bridges the influence of pop culture with middle-class desire and self-worth. It canonises a familiar problem, revolving around two 40-year-old mothers — a prudish Padma (Radhika Apte) and an adventurous Shonali (Konkona Sen Sharma) — stuck in sexless marriages. The two women have reached a stage where all they want is to be wanted again. A corny K-drama gives Shonali a daring idea: a husband swap (reclaiming the iconic Akshay Kumar hand-swap gesture from Ajnabee) on a weekend trip. Padma’s husband, Hemant (Vijay Varma), senses his straight-laced wife’s frustration, unlike Shonali’s husband Debu (Abhishek Banerjee), whose denial is a copout. Given that one of the women is more performative and aggressive, it’s not hard to predict the ‘punchline’ of the premise. Despite a gimmicky resolution, it does a decent job of implying that spicing up a marriage is not everyone’s cup of laced tea. Sometimes, rekindling the fire demands a burn wound or two.
The casting is interesting because it’s against type: Konkona Sen Sharma usually plays the Radhika Apte role, ditto for Vijay Varma ‘swapping’ roles with Abhishek Banerjee. That’s part of the allure, though. Sen Sharma commits to the volume of Shonali (not least during a funky closing shot on the dance floor), but it’s Apte who shows how much we took her for granted when she dominated the early-streaming years. Her Padma is all nerves and shame and thrill and contradictions, serving as the subtext — Padma is more ‘sincere,’ if you may — in a script where morality becomes the refuge of the faint-hearted.
Rao’s segment, second in order, is the most playful and low-stakes of the lot. It starts with an aesthetically pleasing, music-video-coded, magic-light-drenched meet-cute in Mumbai: a pizza-delivery boy locking eyes with a nail stylist in a hipster bylane. A whirlwind romance follows; Bhatinda hunk Karan (the watchable Gurfateh Pirzada) and Mallu cool cat Lisa (Sana Thampi) sail through those whispery song montages. Except Karan is quite the drug dealer and Lisa is a pretty alibi for him — plus he shares a room with his twin named Arjun of course. You know exactly how this messy tale will play out, especially with two red-blooded North Indian males involved. There’s nothing to write home about, other than that it’s a nifty depiction of how lust becomes an instrument of ambition — a hustling means to an end — in a dream-selling metropolis. It’s a lightweight short, processed better as a condiment in a broth of meaty flavours.
It works better as the foil for the intensity of Shakun Batra’s segment, which stars a terrific Ali Fazal and mercurial Radhika Madan as a young couple going through the official cooling-off period for their divorce. Varun and Sainee are ending their 5-year marriage, but they get into a loop of break-up sex as therapy for their emotional incompatibility. There’s a history of resentment and pent-up hurt etched on their faces — in Varun’s wounded glances and Sainee’s snarling gaze — even as they resort to heated communication through their heartbroken bodies.
She can’t stand his mother’s control and his compensatory noble-guy vibes; he can’t handle her trauma and passive aggression. Nobody does contemporary urban conflict (or ‘domestic noir’) better than Batra: the rhythm and spatial feeling, the love lost and found in moments, the musicality of verbal jousting, the petty microaggressions. He mines his comfort zone, which is so strange to say, because psycho-sexual tension is notoriously hard to film. Fazal and Madan are like estranged sharks trapped in a washing machine; their last-gasp chemistry becomes a crutch to revise the freestyle memories they thought they had.
It’s nearly a voyeuristic experience, which is why it’s a bit of a letdown when the film reduces them to a slam-poetry couple who trade overwritten confessions towards the end. They spell out the subtext (“I didn’t want to be the girl who failed at love” and “I didn’t want to be the guy who caused it” or “perhaps our love wasn’t wrong”) in that healing-core, yoga-romance aesthetic. But the two actors at the top of their game keep the film from succumbing to its reflections. It’s a tightrope walk: their separation feels courageous for defying the conventional norms of marriage and lust at once. They’re railing against the old-school idea of compromise and the new-age concessions of individualism. This is the only full-bodied drama of the lot; the other three are peppy romantic comedies.
Last and almost the least, there’s Vishal Bhardwaj’s crowd-pleaser about lust in the time of literary love. The high-pitched, overlong and perky Bhansali-lite short features real-life partners Siddharth and Aditi Rao Hydari as Badru and Saira, a Hyderabadi couple in the 1980s. I like that it deals with a different dimension of lust: not sexlessness or a lack of intimacy, but the inherently patriarchal nature of the act itself. Their marriage is fine, his family is progressive, but Saira bemoans the ignorance surrounding female desire. She wants more, not enough.
Bhardwaj coats this premise with plenty of colour. The sex is functional at best, and she wants the passion of pulpy erotic literature. Saira is a stand-in teacher at a girls’ college, so she ends up using her education and imagination to summon her ideal hero: a rare Indian man in service of the female body. She pens down her own stories — and her unabashedly horny students enjoy the fruits of her talent. The plot may be predictable, but it’s the texture that the film has fun with: the excessive Hyderabadi twang, a montage of word-induced female orgasms (the most writerly fantasy ever), Siddharth and Aditi hamming it up, Gajraj Rao as the paan-chewing and subtitle-needing father-in-law, the sheer traditionalism of her wet dreams, and the corny lyricism of desire (my favourites: “the Vasco da Gama of bedrooms” and “serpent hidden in his towel”).
It’s quite a big swing by Bhardwaj, one that he controls just about enough to stick the landing. Again, it’s not about how things are resolved so much as what lust can mean in the context of companionship. The wives from Motwane’s short and even Sainee from Batra’s film would scoff at someone like Saira for not being happy with weekly ‘sessions,’ a receptive partner, and for having first-world problems in general. But perspective is the victory of Lust Stories 3. By preventing us from comparing segments or viewing them as relative parts, it encourages us to equate circumstances and settings instead. It’s a fairly complete anthology in terms of narrative space. After all, characters and moments are what happens to us when we’re busy expecting plot-sized plans.