We, in the modern world, are more connected to one another than ever before, and increasingly so. But are we also lonelier than ever? In Anuparna Roy’s Lovers in the Blue Night, four strangers, each in a strange place, and each insecure in this place for their own reasons, seek connection and belonging. Love, or at least the semblance of it, is forged out of desire and desperation; with it, a place that feels less strange, less lonely. And if desire and desperation will lead them down uncertain paths, at least it’s a hopeful uncertainty.
Roy’s strangers are all beaten down and pushed back, into the seedy corners of Mumbai, a city none of them has long called home. Karim (Pritam Pilania) works as a rat catcher, planting poison around the city with little enthusiasm. Ameena (Neelima Sharma) is his wife, newly arrived and working as a phone sex operator in a bar; the two are barely familiar to each other. Omran (Jatin Sarin) is hired in a more senior position in the same bar, where his boss instructs him to hide his ethnicity. Sukka (Bhushan Shimpi) is a thief with a heavily pregnant wife, and takes Karim under his wing following a chance encounter. For all four, hope is both a choice and a necessity — as each grasps at it, they risk losing what little they have, but gaining a future where they have so much more.
It’s Roy’s compassion, and the nuances she finds in her characters’ situations, that sustains Lovers in the Blue Night. As they travel through time and the city, rarely in comfort or prosperity, they manufacture a feeling of home in people, places, even imagination — Karim and Sukka in a shack or in the back of a van, and Ameena in the love letters a client writes to her. These letters are the movie’s richest and most astute observation on the nature of belonging — she struggles to read Hindi, is misidentified by the client as a lost love from his past, and believes Omran to be the writer. She assumes this mistaken identity and attempts to grow closer to Omran, even as he knows he’s not responsible for the letters, and as both know who she truly is. The pretense may be false, but its performance is real, and it exposes the loneliness in both performers, a loneliness through which they bond.
Ameena’s loneliness at home isn’t exclusively due to her and Karim’s unfamiliarity, though. It’s also due to his unwillingness to develop a romantic relationship with her, a reticence arising from the fact that Karim is gay and closeted. Whether it’s through a fresh sense of purpose, having been shown a tempting shortcut to a better life by Sukka, or genuine attraction, Karim makes advances on his new mentor, and it’s here that elements of the movie begin to disintegrate. Sukka has made no apparent overtures that he might be receptive to this relationship, yet he submits as swiftly and eagerly as Karim — one may wonder if Roy is simply engineering matters to arrive at predestined conclusions. By the end, one may be certain of it — though there are some sharp observations and beautiful scenes along the way, there’s a neatness to the narrative that rings untrue. There’s a lack of originality too, with the pedestrian melodrama plot and subtle stylistic references to Wong Kar Wai that don’t exactly flatter Roy.
This all amounts to a general inconsistency in Lovers in the Blue Night that can make it a rather jarring watch. Some scenes are patient, lyrical, and sincere, while others feel lifted straight out of a dated soap opera (a confrontation between Sukka, his wife, and his boss is particularly crass). The score, by Nishant Ramteke, is alternately poetic and intrusive, while the film’s imagery — through the efforts of Roy and cinematographer Debjit Samanta — is vivid, but frustratingly inexpressive; it’s in the vein of much modern cinematography in that it looks more suitable for an attractive Tumblr post than for the big screen. There are also some curious errors, like a clearly intact TV screen that’s supposed to be smashed, or the awkward framing of a supposedly dying dog.
Lovers in the Blue Night is a messy movie, yet it has a generally subdued, romantic tone, and somehow the cultivation of this tone is persuasive, if only to an extent. If the unoriginality and the errors linger in the mind, so too do certain details and gestures — Ameena’s arm tentatively nudging toward Karim’s, the poignant expression on Karim’s face as he describes his childhood to Sukka, or his hesitance to follow him into the sea in one (otherwise overwrought) scene. Like her characters, Roy knows how to extract truth from falsehood, drawing sincerity and emotional depth out of cliché. But cliché is still cliché, and Lovers in the Blue Night never fully overcomes it.
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