Filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee, who has previously directed films like ‘Khosla Ka Ghosla’, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!’. ‘Love Sex Aur Dhokha’ and ‘Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!’, is back with his latest flick ‘Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar’ starring Parineeti Chopra and Arjun Kapoor.

Talking about the genre of the film, which is more than just a love story, he told Film Companion in an interview, “I can’t make that traditional love story because first of all, there is no story there for me. Secondly, it bores me to death. Like my film might bore somebody to death… So for me I choose not to understand in the cinema context what is this love. Because I don’t know what love is.”

“I can understand lust, I can understand trust, I can understand betrayal, I can understand class, I can understand fear. I can understand sympathy, empathy. And I can understand attraction and repulsion. Woh luv shuv ka mereko nahi pata. Because love is something… I mean the way I love my children, my family, my partner, my wife…”

The director says that he is touching an age where he can’t identify with the love shown in Bollywood films.

“Secondly, I have come to an age, crowding 50, where I can’t identify with the trope of love as put forward by Bollywood because most of it has to do with sexual repression. Last 20-30 years, most of it has to do with teen and young people’s isolation and sexual depression and giving them stories that sublimate that sexual repression into something called love.

“It’s basically a conservative and deeply anxious society which is trying to tell itself stories, which are again, stories constructed by the elite. It’s basically a way of monetising sexual repression. But as you realize over the last 10 years as India has kind of, I won’t say that India has gone through a sexual revolution, but India’s sexual repression has started lifting a bit in a very confused, fractious way. The typical love stories have disappeared….”

‘Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar’ is directed and produced by Banerjee with distribution by Yash Raj Films. The film was initially scheduled for theatrical release in 2020 but the pandemic has pushed the release date.

It was finally released on March 19, this year.