Sex is easy to show. Desire is considerably harder to understand. That is perhaps what makes Lust Stories 3 such a refreshing piece of Hindi...
Sex is easy to show. Desire is considerably harder to understand.
That is perhaps what makes Lust Stories 3 such a refreshing piece of Hindi cinema. In an industry that has frequently confused eroticism with exposure and sexuality with titillation, this anthology understands that the most interesting things about sex often happen long before and long after the bedroom. Desire can be mischievous, awkward, funny, selfish, tender, liberating and frightening. It can expose the fault lines in a marriage, reveal an insecurity that has remained buried for years, or simply remind someone that beneath the roles they perform for family and society, they remain flesh-and-blood human beings capable of wanting and being wanted.
It is this understanding that gives Lust Stories 3 its unusual vitality. Vikramaditya Motwane, Kiran Rao, Shakun Batra and Vishal Bhardwaj approach the same broad territory from four completely different directions, and yet their films sit together remarkably well. There is eroticism without gratuitousness, humour without frivolity and emotional depth without sermonising. Most importantly, there is an intelligent and remarkably unembarrassed understanding of human sexuality.
Motwane’s opening contribution, featuring Konkona Sen Sharma and Radhika Apte, immediately establishes that this will not be an anthology interested merely in showing people having sex. Motwane is concerned with what desire does to people. His characters exist within relationships and social structures that demand a certain idea of normalcy, while their private selves are considerably more complicated. Konkona brings her characteristic ability to suggest several emotions simultaneously; beneath the apparent composure is curiosity, restlessness and a desire to understand herself. Radhika Apte provides a fascinating counterpoint, bringing an almost matter-of-fact quality to sexuality that prevents it from becoming either taboo or melodrama.
What makes Motwane’s segment particularly effective is its humour. Sex is often absurd precisely because human beings become so serious about it. People lie, pretend, negotiate, conceal and occasionally behave ridiculously while attempting to maintain the illusion that they have everything under control. Motwane recognises this beautifully. The laughs emerge from character rather than punchlines, and the comedy ultimately makes the emotional undercurrents more affecting.
Kiran Rao then changes the register completely. Her segment is playful, quirky and deceptively light, but beneath the humour is the same fascination with the ways in which desire refuses to remain neat and predictable. Rao has always possessed an instinct for finding the strange in the ordinary, and here she turns sexuality into a space for comedy, curiosity and human eccentricity. The lighter tone is welcome because it prevents the anthology from becoming uniformly solemn about its subject.
There is something wonderfully democratic about Rao’s treatment of desire. It does not belong exclusively to the young, the beautiful or the conventionally romantic. It exists in ordinary people, in unexpected circumstances and sometimes in forms that society would rather not acknowledge. The laughter therefore becomes part of the film’s larger argument: perhaps we should stop behaving as though sexuality is something that must always be discussed in hushed voices.
Shakun Batra’s contribution, starring Ali Fazal and Radhika Madan, takes the conversation into more emotionally complicated territory. Batra’s cinema has repeatedly examined relationships from the inside, particularly the distance that can develop between two people who technically remain together. Here, physical intimacy becomes a barometer of emotional intimacy. The question is not simply whether two people desire each other, but what that desire means when affection, resentment, insecurity and familiarity have all accumulated around it.
Batra understands that sometimes people seek sex when what they are actually seeking is reassurance. They want to know that they are still attractive, still noticed, still capable of provoking something in the person they love. Physical intimacy can therefore become a conversation without words, and when that conversation breaks down, the silence can be more revealing than anything the characters say.
Ali Fazal and Radhika Madan inhabit this emotional uncertainty without turning it into melodrama. Their performances give the story an uncomfortable recognisability. There is nothing particularly extraordinary about these people, which is precisely the point. Their complications could belong to almost anyone.
And then comes Vishal Bhardwaj, who saves perhaps the most unexpected tonal shift for the finale.
Bhardwaj’s contribution, with Aditi Rao Hydari and Siddharth, carries his unmistakable ability to create an entire world around his characters. Period atmosphere, language, music and setting become part of the sensuality of the story. But beneath the period trappings is an entirely contemporary concern: what happens when marriage continues to provide companionship and affection but somehow forgets desire?
Aditi Rao Hydari is magnificent because she does not play sexuality as performance. Her character’s longing comes from something far more human—the desire to feel desired. There is a difference, and Bhardwaj understands it. A woman can be loved by her husband and still want to be looked at differently. She can be secure in a marriage and yet miss the excitement of being an object of someone’s fascination. She can be a wife without ceasing to be a woman.
Siddharth complements her beautifully, and Bhardwaj finds humour without diminishing the seriousness of the emotional situation. The result is perhaps the most quietly poignant segment of the anthology because its eroticism is inseparable from its tenderness.
And that, ultimately, is what makes Lust Stories 3 work.
The four films are not variations on a single formula. Motwane looks at desire through psychological disruption; Rao discovers its comic and eccentric possibilities; Batra examines the emotional complications surrounding intimacy; Bhardwaj locates it within marriage, ageing desire and the need for recognition. Their approaches are different, but none of them treats sexuality as an isolated physical act.
There is, however, one mild reservation. Female sexuality is given considerably greater space and complexity than male sexuality. That imbalance is understandable, particularly in the context of Hindi cinema’s long history of viewing female desire through a male gaze. Giving women agency over their sexuality is therefore not merely refreshing but necessary. Yet the anthology occasionally leaves male desire standing at the margins. The men are frequently responding to, accommodating or being confronted by female sexuality rather than being given equally searching explorations of their own fears, fantasies and vulnerabilities. It would have been fascinating to see the same degree of curiosity applied to the male sexual psyche.
But this remains a relatively minor reservation in an anthology that gets so much else right.
Because what a pleasure it is to see four established filmmakers being allowed to make four small films about something as fundamentally human as desire—and to discover that none of them needs to shout to make its point.
Lust Stories 3 is sexy without desperately trying to be sexy. It is funny without turning its characters into caricatures. It is thoughtful without becoming preachy. And it understands that the most revealing thing about sexuality is often not the act itself, but the emotions surrounding it: the need to be seen, the fear of rejection, the excitement of discovery, the comfort of familiarity and the unsettling realisation that even after decades of loving someone, there can still be parts of ourselves that remain unexplored.
Perhaps that is the anthology’s greatest achievement. It takes lust out of the shadows without making it a spectacle. It treats desire neither as sin nor liberation, neither as comedy nor tragedy, but simply as one of those complicated human impulses that refuses to be neatly categorised.
Four directors. Four stories. Four different ways of looking at the same mysterious human hunger.
And when the final frame fades, what remains is not the memory of what these characters did, but the much more intimate question of why they wanted to do it in the first place.
That is where Lust Stories 3 finds its humanity.
And that is where its stories linger.
By Pratik Majumdar (author: Love Coffee Murder and 1975 The Year That Transformed Bollywood)
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