A devout widow insists her grand-daughter make sure the guy is good in bed before they get married. An architect who happens to be single secretly returns home after leaving work to spy on the domestic help having sex with her husband. A philandering CEO meets his long lost wife after getting into an accident in a remote place and promptly decides to assert his dominance over her. A mother plagued by domestic abuse tries to honeytrap her depraved has-been of a landlord husband but only piles up further generational trauma. The four tales in Netflix’s recent follow-up to its 2018 anthology, Lust Stories, are much more attuned to the violence and psychological warfare that animates heterosexual relationships and the families that survive around them in this country. 

Neena Gupta’s feisty dadi decides to start flipping the narrative on sex one day, berating her son and daughter-in-law to look at sex beyond childbearing responsibilities. She recounts to her granddaughter tales surrounding the wholesome sex she and her late husband enjoyed. R. Balki frames this sexual libertarianism as the crowning triumph of his short, ‘Made for Each Other’. 

Where the filmmaking falters is in failing to recognise that this champion of sexual liberation is also the matriarch of the family. She brings with herself conservative notions that overtly privilege marriage and its tenets. Both sex and mutual pleasure in the act become means to an end–preserving the institution of marriage. The implication is that divorce, infidelity, abuse, or dejection stand no chance–if the sex is good. While we may all wish for our elders to be more sex positive, it turns out that the parental injunction that we must have sex can be worse than the opposite. A lot less Cheeni Kum (2007) and some more of the spirit of Gupta’s Badhaai Ho (2018) may have helped here.

Both sex and mutual pleasure in the act become means to an end–preserving the institution of marriage. The implication is that divorce, infidelity, abuse, or dejection stand no chance–if the sex is good. While we may all wish for our elders to be more sex positive, it turns out that the parental injunction that we must have sex can be worse than the opposite.

The film then dives headfirst into Konkona Sen Sharma’s ‘The Mirror’, almost as apologia for its heterosexual focus. Tilottama Shome’s high functioning Isheeta suffers from her chronically single life. Her clandestine trysts watching Amruta Subhash’s Seema and her husband (played to perfection by Shrikant Yadav) are a celebration of the female gaze, as this becomes a guilty antidote to her loneliness. Seema feels her employer’s eye on them via the strategically placed oval mirror, revels in it, and is inspired to be even more audacious with her husband. 

But Konkona does not stop here. In an inspired reversal of Shome’s lauded turn as the domestic worker Ratna in Rohena Gera’s doomed inter-class romance Sir (2018), she lashes out at Seema when her presence is discovered in the house during one of these conjugal visits. With a vehemence that goes beyond class into the casteist, she invalidates their very bodies as incapable of being worthy of her desire. Her rejection of the care work Seema performs and the intimacy they, therefore, share also discounts the labour these same bodies put into maintaining her way of life.

Seema’s playful acceptance of her employer’s attentions transform into an equally scathing critique that turns Isheeta’s gaze back at her, exposing both the transgressive and voyeuristic nature of her desire.

These nuances are all but abandoned in Sujoy Ghosh’s segment, where the camera itself stands in for its lecherous lead, played/sleepwalked in this film by Vijay Verma. An awareness of Tamannaah Bhatia’s history of being objectified in multiple Indian film industries for the kind of idealistic body type she represents is signalled but the end result is more of the same. ‘Sex with the Ex’ tries to not only have and eat its cake but also thirst trap it for Instagram. The matrix of intrigue and seduction that worked for Ghosh’s Ahalya (2014) feels dated and regressive here. The unease is contrived, the critique weak, and the resolution plainly sexist. The male gaze is the only character that strikes back with a vengeance.

The anthology pivots into its final offering here with ‘Tilchatta’, where Amit Sharma and co-writer Saurabh Choudhary manage to mangle ideas surrounding sex work, domestic abuse, and AIDS. This could have made for a potent exploration of this intersection, if the film did not insist on weaponsing them for a revenge tale that goes horribly wrong.

Kumud Mishra delivers a scintillating performance as a landlord holding on to his property and vices even as his wealth and position pass him by, but the space offered by his disdain for caste-based reservations is also left unexamined by the short’s single minded insistence on conflating the categories of sex worker and prostitute through his wife Chanda, played by Kajol. Her history of being a ‘fallen’ woman in the past and using the AIDS-infected body of another to drive the climax does neither the historically stigmatised profession nor the disease any justice, instead painting a bleak picture of how cycles of pain and abuse can never be broken off from, only perpetuated.

There is merit in noting here that the film that towers over the rest in this anthology is the only one directed by a woman. One of the more excellent touches in Konkona’s short is the way it refuses to draw to a close. It does not end with the peeping, the outburst, or even the quiet reconciliation at the local vegetable stall. The camera returns to the scene of the crime (against heteronormativity).

There is merit in noting here that the film that towers over the rest in this anthology is the only one directed by a woman. One of the more excellent touches in Konkona’s short is the way it refuses to draw to a close. It does not end with the peeping, the outburst, or even the quiet reconciliation at the local vegetable stall. The camera returns to the scene of the crime (against heteronormativity). The flat, the bed, the mirror, are all waiting to see where this goes next. The camera pans to the door, which swings open and cuts to nothing. There is no surrender to an all consuming male gaze. Lust is freed as a function of bodies that trigger and experience desire, and not as a means to control people and their relationships.