Men's lust is typical, boring: Anurag Kashyap on "Lust Stories"
When four top directors of Bollywood came together to explore the theme of lust, they ended up choosing female protagonists and filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, one of the four directors, says the reason could be that men's lust is "boring and typical". Titled "Lust Stories", the Netflix movie brings together four short films, helmed by filmmakers like Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee, and Karan Johar.
The short films talk about female desire through several characters, a teacher-student relationship in Kashyap's, the relationship between a maid and her employer in Zoya's, a woman's extramarital-affair in Dibakar's, and a newly-wed but unhappy wife in Johar's film. "It was by chance that the protagonists are women. In our country, when you talk about lust, men's lust gets so boring," Kashyap said.
"In a country which has so much repressed sexuality, where a woman is not supposed to have lust, I think that's why somewhere all of us chose a woman as the protagonist," Kashyap said.
Kashyap's short film is about a married college professor, Radhika Apte, who enters into a sexual relationship with one of her students (played by "Sairat fame Akash Thosar). While Apte's character, Kalindi, wants to have "life experiences" and despises the thought of men getting clingy post an intimate encounter, she soon starts contradicting everything she says in the course of the 30-minute comedy short.
Anurag Kashyap said he was inspired by his women friends for the story and developed it with Apte, who also shares the writing credit on the project.
Kashyap praised Apte for being "comfortable with contradictions". "A lot of actors judge themselves when they play something like that. They all want to come across as a good person. They never become real. It's all about wanting to be the good one," Kashyap said The Mukkabaaz director said nobody wants to play it real with their contradictions, vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and Radhika understands that.
"There is some incredible trust that we have, I've done three shorts with her. The amount of trust she gives me, I get it from very few actors. I throw things at her and she bounces it back," Kashyap said.
