Netflix’s Lust Stories is the only anthology to have made it to its third season, and there might be good reason. For a society as repressed as ours, sex brings out adequate intrigue on the part of the audience, assuring a base viewership. Meanwhile, by constantly shuffling filmmakers, the interpretations remain fresh, and sex becomes a capsule to be filled with commentary on inequities, female desire, and a rarely spoken language in an otherwise verbose film industry.

Lust Stories 3 features a line-up of directors, which audiences will forever be curious about: Kiran Rao, Vikramaditya Motwane, Shakun Batra and Vishal Bhardwaj. The results are middling to positive. But one thing I genuinely appreciated about all four films, is their intent to showcase the length and breadth of Hindi cinema, and its varying aesthetic, refusing to paint Bollywood as a monolith – which it has begun to seem like, given its over-dependence on star-led spectacles. Also, I enjoyed the music in all films, complimenting the sensibility of the respective mise en scene. 

Shonali (Konkona Sen Sharma) and Padma (Radhika Apte) are two women in their forties, stuck in a sexless marriage with their husbands, Debu (Abhishek Banerjee) and Hemant (Vijay Varma) respectively. At the suggestion of a K-drama that both women are obsessed with, they come up with a plan of swapping their husbands during a staycation, in a bid to spice things up.

Written by Avinash Sampath (who wrote Motwane’s last two feature films for Netflix) the film comes on too strong out of the gates, understandable for the tight runtime of ~40 mins. There’s a lot of information to be conveyed about the world, characters, and conflict. However, it’s easy to look past that because its primary cast brings its game face. Sen Sharma, who directed one of the shorts in the second instalment of Lust Stories, is........

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