A newly married Haryanvi girl records a video message for her father. She wants the world to know that she is now legally wedded to the boy she has run away with. She holds up a marriage certificate. I am tired of being chased, she says. Her eyes well up. Her husband reassuringly puts his hand on hers. But fear is writ large on their faces because they probably know that nothing, be it a judge's order or a safe home, can save them from the ire of the girl's family.
In these opening moments of the blandly titled Love Hostel, writer-director Shanker Raman delivers a grim reminder of the absolute lawlessness that prevails in this neck of the woods. A bit later in the gritty, tensile drama about an interfaith marriage and its repercussions, a right-thinking lawyer who helps another runaway couple - the film's two protagonists - falls foul of an assassin on the prowl.
In the dystopian universe that Love Hostel portrays, honour killings are commonplace and self-appointed guardians of morality hold sway. Young people in love have to respect tradition. When they don't, there is hell to pay. We have seen this before on the screen but seldom in a narrative capsule so taut and compelling.
Vikrant Massey and Sanya Malhotra, embodying two lovers absconding from a hateful world, deliver a pair of impressive performances. Love Hostel pans out in Rohtak and its surroundings but the film has been shot in and around Bhopal. Does that lessen its authenticity and power? It doesn't because the unflinching tale never loses focus and shoots from the hip, straight and sharp.
Bobby Deol, behind a beard and a deep facial scar, plays a killer who pursues the lovers and all those who dare to stand up for the pair. He is a shadowy figure who, in the police records, is dead. He operates unhindered and kills at will.
Love Hostel is, in many senses, a follow-up to Raman's directorial debut Gurgaon. The cinematographer-turned-director's first film was about patriarchy and greed in a gleaming, thriving Millennium City flanked by the metropolis of Delhi and the boondocks of Haryana.
Love Hostel - it wouldn't have been off the work had the film been titled Rohtak - lays bare the perils of love and rebellion in a part of the world where politics, orthodoxy, religious bigotry and violence form a toxic and lethal cocktail.
Strikingly shot by cinematographer Vivek Shah (who also lensed Gurgaon) and crisply edited by Nitin Baid and Shan Mohammed, Love Hostel, a Zee5 original movie, is a stark portrait of hell on earth painted with the colours of the soil and the sky, etched with fire, and melded into a subdued yet searing palette.
The dominant hue on this corrosive canvas alternates between blood-red and pitch-dark, both of which are obviously rendered more in a metaphorical sense than in a physical, literal one. The malefic vice-like grip that the mofussil moral police have on the lives of the young suffocates and snuffs and leaves behind a trail of blood and darkness.
Love Hostel works with a thin plot but, with the aid of its precisely calculated arcs, throws powerful, well-directed punches at a society that thrives on prejudice and militates against freedom.
In one telling scene, a police officer visits a powerful politician and seeks to know the whereabouts of a killer on the rampage. The politician points to several young boys playing around her and with ominous nonchalance says that the guy that the policeman is looking for could be any one of these pre-teens.
Yes, the story does have also a boy barely out of his teens - he is the heroine's brother (played by Yudhvir Ahlawat) - who turns violent at the slightest provocation and delights in the fact that he is doing his bit to sustain a legacy of misogyny.
An interfaith couple is on the run from a pitiless man, Viraj Singh Dagar (Deol). The latter has been deployed by the ruthless local MLA, Kamla Dilawar (Swaroopa Ghosh, aptly chilling), who also happens to be the girl's grandmother.
Love Hostel is a love story in which hatred has the greatest chance of triumphing. In a khap panchayat-ruled region, rebellion against centuries-old social codes is the worst crime that a youngster can commit. No transgression is as dangerous as a girl asserting her right to marry a man from another religion.
All hell breaks loose when, on the day of her engagement, Jyoti 'Billo' Dilawar commits the cardinal sin of fleeing her home to be with the man she loves. That man is Ahmed 'Ashu' Shokeen, son of a Muslim meat-seller who has been branded a terrorist on a trumped-up charge and imprisoned.
Jyoti's grandmother lets the murderous Dagar loose on the young lovers. Lawyer Ashok Khanna (Vishal Om Prakash) and school teacher Nidhi Dahiya (Aditi Vasudev) stick their necks out and help Billo and Ashu. A court orders government protection for the young couple. But Billo and Ashu's safe home neither feels like home nor is it safe. A slimy cop (Sidharth Bhardwaj) is in charge of the place.
But not all cops here are co-opted. An upright police officer, Sushil Rathi (Raj Arjun, superb), has a personal stake in bringing Dagar to book but his mission is understandably fraught with risk.
Shanker Raman's screenplay is minimalist sinewy but the film manages to squeeze into its runtime of an hour and a half the tangled and overlapping pasts of Viraj Singh Dagar, DSP Sushil Rathi and Nidhi Dahiya. The economy of means with which this is done borders on the phenomenal.
Two unstoppable forces are pitted against each other in Love Hostel. On one side is defiant young love. It engenders bravery and assertion. On the other is unbridled power. It secretes venom in a climate that thrives on dividing people and terrorizing innocents.
Bobby Deol renders the emotionless Dagar to perfection, not merely as a cold-blooded enforcer but also as an ends-justify-the-means sort of moral crusader who believes that his job is to cleanse his community of unwanted elements. His rage is rooted in loss, both personal and perceived, and his 'activism' is fuelled by false righteousness.
Love Hostel is a tremendously courageous film that is particularly remarkable because of the way it delineates the battle that the two young protagonists wage as they seek solace in each other's company. They aren't conventional Bollywood lovebirds singing and dancing and whining and wailing as the dodge the fury of a powerful parent who sends human bloodhounds after them.
Billo and Ashu are like any of those faceless youngsters who fall in love every day in India's villages and small towns only to find their paths blocked by entrenched inimical forces that seek ammunition in what divides us as a nation rather than in what binds us as a people.
In the relationship, the girl is the tougher one. Sanya Malhotra portrays her spunk and spirit without going overboard. The boy is far less confident and this springs as much from his fear of the people he has antagonized as it does from the constant othering he has to endure. Vikrant Massey projects a version of masculinity that does not shy away from embracing emotional vulnerability.
The man cries. The woman wipes his tears. You instantly know, if you haven't been convinced already, that Love Hostel is no ordinary film. It holds nothing back in articulating its concerns about a lacerated society that is in dire need of healing.
We haven't seen anything as fearless and powerful as Love Hostel in a long, long time.