Lust Stories 2: In appreciation of Tamannaah and Vijay Varma’s Sex with the Ex, the ugly duckling of Netflix’s anthology

The environments around him are computer-generated, the song “Jab Koi Baat Bigad Jaaye” is playing on the radio, and his reverie is rudely interrupted by the most comically dramatic phone call from his boss, who scolds him for skipping town and immediately summons him back to Mumbai. Distracted by desire for a second, he crashes his car into a tree, and finds that he is in the middle of nowhere.

A local cyclist takes him to a nearby village, where he finds a mechanic whose only landline phone has been “dead for two months.” Confused and alone in a strange new world, which has the slightly off-kilter look and feel of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, our protagonist is once again distracted by the tunes of “Jab Koi Baat Bigad Jaaye” — the song is going to be a recurring motif in the movie. As he is lured in the direction of the music, he finds himself in a building simply labeled “community centre.” There, he comes face-to-face with a ghost from the past — his ex-wife, Shanti, played by Tamannaah Bhatia.

A victim of its own marketing (and the always arbitrary manner in which Netflix seems to package these anthologies), Sex with the Ex has been unfairly criticised for its odd tone and lack of chemistry between the two leads. But in a hurry to slam Ghosh for not delivering the movie they were hoping to watch, people haven’t bothered to wonder if he actually wanted to make that movie in the first place. It’s like pooh-poohing about Pathaan not having enough Johnny Lever scenes. For starters, Sex with the Ex isn’t a romantic drama at all; it’s actually a fairly funny satire on Bollywood potboilers, in which the main character wears a denim jacket over a black shirt and is quite literally named Vijay Chauhan.

Varma’s line delivery when he introduces himself, with a perfectly-timed pause, reads almost like the punchline of a joke. It’s a great performance. But from their first conversation itself, it is clear that there is some discomfort between Vijay and Shanti. He leers at her, and she recoils. Every time he touches her, she tenses up. When the camera lingers on Tamannaah, a sinister chord clangs in the background, further establishing Vijay’s questionable morality. Later, when they’re in her house together, Vijay makes a move on Shanti, who doesn’t give him verbal consent. He backs off, apologising for his ‘purani aadat’. The movie is implying that in their past lives together, Vijay was physically abusive. Everything that unfolds from this moment on is coloured by this realisation.

When Vijay peeps at Shanti taking a shower, or when he rifles through her underwear, he isn’t supposed to be perceived as the hero of the story. This isn’t Kantara. The movie has already shown you enough evidence to suggest that there’s something off about him. The sole sex scene, for instance, is scored like a tense face-off. It isn’t meant to be romantic or titillating at all; there is no room for violins and flutes.

Because of a collective misreading of Kahaani as a ‘serious film’ — it was just as playful as his other work — Ghosh has forever been slotted as a director of serious cinema. In reality, however, his commitment to making B-movies remains impressively unchanged. Sex with the Ex is every bit as subversive as Konkona Sen Sharma’s short, which has been correctly declared the best of the lot. Sen Sharma’s film is also the kinkiest entry in the anthology, which, in case you’d forgotten, also happens to include an almost unwatchable segment in which an elderly woman, apparently overnight, turns into a sex maniac.

Ghosh pulls off this delicate tonal balancing act via aesthetic, yes, but also by extracting performances from his two leads that are always slightly, for lack of a better word, ‘filmy’. But that’s only because the movie itself is a send-up of Hindi pulp fiction and ‘80s cringe-fests, a lot of which, by the way, were filmed against matte painting backdrops. In this regard, Sex with the Ex is also a far more effective experience than Netflix’s own Haseen Dillruba, which was ultimately indistinguishable from the trash that it was satirising.

There’s a reason why Tamannaah is wearing the skimpiest of sarees; she’s a figment of Vijay’s imagination, and that’s how he perceives women. Shanti doesn’t dress like that at all in those CID-inspired flashback sequences. Filled with exposition delivered in a giddily grave manner, and accompanied by a dramatic background score, these flashbacks reveal that Vijay paid two people off to kill Shanti when he learned that she’d become pregnant with his child. During this time, he was cheating on her with their friend Anu. The film’s final twist is the revelation that Vijay has been dead all along, having succumbed in that car crash from the first scene.

The movie, as it turns out, had judged him in the opening minutes itself. What we watched was only prolonged suffering in purgatory, and even there, Vijay Chauhan couldn’t stop being evil.