Will the Dibakar Banerjee curse end with LSD 2? Tees, Khosla Ka Ghosla, Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar; the filmmaker has never had it easy

Will the Dibakar Banerjee curse end with LSD 2? Tees, Khosla Ka Ghosla, Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar; the filmmaker has never had it easy

Filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee is no stranger to facing setbacks in his professional career. He faced numerous delays with his first film, Khosla Ka Ghosla, and more recently, was left with no option but to watch silently as Netflix removed his film Tees from their release schedule. Dibakar would hope to break this curse with his latest film, LSD 2, which, despite its potentially racy subject matter, is lined up for release on Friday. Dibakar said that he didn’t face many issues with the Central Board of Film Certification as he tried to get clearance for the film, but admitted that he was asked to censor a few instances of nudity.

Releasing LSD 2, at least according to the filmmaker, has been a relatively smooth process, especially when compared to the difficulties that he has become accustomed to through the course of his career. In a 2018 interview with Film Companion, Dibakar said that it took him over two years to release Khosla Ka Ghosla. “Those two-and-a-half years is when I lost my arrogance because I was realising that I was getting very dark,” he said, adding, “I was just becoming extremely depressed and negative, and then I had a chat with my wife. And the next day, I basically gave up on the film.”

Dibakar said that he was basically pulling people off the street and asking them to watch the film, even as it failed to secure distribution. After a point, he started to think that the movie ‘would never release’. During this time, he was surviving on his wife’s earnings. He said that thanks to his wife, he was able to have a decent living, but couldn’t imagine what people without such privileges do. He described Mumbai as “one of the most ruthless cities” for people without any options. Eventually, UTV picked the film up, and Khosla Ka Ghosla went on to become a cult classic.

Despite his outsider roots, Dibakar Banerjee found himself with a multi-film deal with the iconic Hindi film studio Yash Raj Films. His first project with YRF was Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!, which underperformed at the box office. He went to produce Kanu Behl’s debut feature Titli for YRF, before directing his second feature for the studio, Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar. The film languished for years on the shelves, with YRF refusing to give it a release date. Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar was given a token release during the pandemic, with little publicity. In an interview with YouTuber Samdish Bhatia, Dibakar said that he had no idea that the film had been released on Amazon Prime Video, and that actor Arjun Kapoor was the one who alerted him about this.

“The way Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar was released, you know how it was released? Arjun called me and said, ‘Sir, it has released. The film has been released!’ So I asked him about marketing and he said he didn’t know about marketing but the film had released,” he said, adding, “He saw it, there was no marketing, nothing… So what happens is, you realise that you are a problem. It released on Amazon, so at least a few people watched it. But this problem is going to increase, it is going to get bigger and become a bigger issue.”

The issue certainly did become bigger; if some films could be brushed under the carpet, others could be axed altogether. And that’s exactly what Netflix did when it cancelled the release of his ambitious film Tees altogether. This, by the way, after Dibakar had collaborated with the streamer on Lust Stories and Ghost Stories. Netflix didn’t provide any detailed explanation for why it cancelled Tees, which has been fully completed. “Netflix has never given me any other reason except they don’t know if this is the right time to release the film,” Banerjee told Deadline. “Given what happened with Tandav, the only conclusion to reach is that Netflix is reluctant to release the film out of fear of being similarly targeted. But the film I have made is very different to the web series in question.”

Tees was announced in 2019 and described as ‘the story of an Indian family interwoven with the personal, ideological and sexual history of India.’ The cast includes Naseeruddin Shah, Kalki Koechlin, Manisha Koirala, Divya Dutta, Huma Qureshi, Zoya Husain, Shashank Arora and Neeraj Kabi. Dibakar has been told that he is free to shop for alternate distribution for the film, but there have been no updates on this front yet. Meanwhile, LSD 2 was released in theatres on April 19.

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