Brown is the warmest colour

A businessman bursts into tears by the side of his plush hotel bed. He is ashamed, frustrated, sick, confused, broken, and horribly besotted. Moments ago, he mounted his lover — now motionless and numb — non-consensually on the bed. In a brutal display of suppressed angst, he forced his way, after being playfully denied throughout their clandestine weekend together. He is married, but not to the assaulted person in the sheets. What they’re doing is forbidden; what he has just done seemed painfully inevitable. For some reason, it doesn’t look as repulsive as it should. In two hours, this man must go back to his life 8,000 miles away. This was his final act of desperation — and love. A messy kind of love. A jumbled-up kind of love. He won’t get another chance.

They’d never last, and it’s not just because they’re cheating. It’s not because they’re two men. It's not even because they're not Indian men, Jai (Shiv Pandit) and Sahil (Dhruv). And this is only partially their tragedy. This torrid scene belongs to Sudhanshu Saria’s LOEV , an independent film that explores a very different gaze of sexual orientation and companionship.

Different, perhaps for how bereft of gaze their bond is. Different, because they aren’t looked at differently, or as closeted victims and uncomfortable adults; on the contrary, when the gardener of their rented mountain cottage eyes them suspiciously, I’m the only one socially conditioned to expect something ominous to happen. I’m the only one hoping they don’t get lynched. Nothing happens. They go about their frolicking and flirting with loaded undercurrents. They’re not on the run, there’s no reason for them to be fearful. Different, because when they stride to the restaurant soon after Jai violates him, Sahil tries to grasp Jai’s hand; he wants Jai to know that it’s okay, that it’s not his fault and this isn’t one-way traffic; Jai lets him, for a fleeting second, before pulling away; one assumes this is a reflex reaction in a country where homosexuality is a criminal offence, given the number of waiters and ‘decent’ people around; seconds later, they’re seated with Sahil’s extravagant boyfriend, Alex (Siddharth Menon), who was waiting for them at the table.

The handholding was never the problem, the legitimacy of it was. Strangers aren’t the issue, the strangeness of their situation is. Jai has been uptight all this while because he is trapped in the life demanded of him. Sahil has been cautious because feelings are a luxury he cannot afford.

With the man-child that Alex is, Sahil is forced to feel like an adult and a parent in their relationship. As soon as he sees the suave Jai — their body language hints that this isn’t the first time — he allows himself to feel like Alex. He feels free and taken care of for a change, and savours his domestic role in their equation.

Saria constructs

LOEV as a gentle film, giving us enough time and space to forget who these three men really are, or what they signify, or why they got here. You feel for them, but not because society’s walls are closing in on them. You stop wanting to look at the sides of the screen to examine passing expressions. All you want is to know why they’re incomplete. You wonder who is aware of what in this perplexing friendship. You stop wondering about how their families must have disowned Alex and Sahil — a possibility implied by the way they’re struggling to survive in Mumbai. This is a story of what may happen after the end credits of an against-all-odds love story. They’re way past eloping and fighting the system; they’ve probably spent so long trying to make this life that they’ve forgotten how to live it. Some couples are meant to perish, but Alex and Sahil adapt instead. They shouldn’t have. As a result, Jai is, both, a consequence and cause of this fading afterglow.

Despite watching this film more than eight months ago, its moments have stayed with me. Saria’s handling of their resolution, if one can call it that, feels as crushing as it was back then. Only when you read terms like ‘Indian gay film’ or ‘LGBT movie’ (as it is referred to in international festival circles), you tend to look back and replay their glances and quietness and despair and giggles in a restrictive context. When one learns that Sahil is actor Dhruv Ganesh’s final performance before his untimely passing, there seems to be a mortal poignancy to his sickly appearance; his empty sighs and crossed heart. But unlike contemporary conversation-furthering efforts like Aligarh , (segments of) Kapoor & Sons , Onir’s I Am and Bombay Talkies , LOEV isn’t designed around these identities and prohibitive environments. It has no statements to make. It just happens to be about some men and tortured love, not tortured men of love.

Mentally, one immediately labels Jai as the conflicted man and Sahil as the woman who deserves better: a self-defeating analogy, given that there is such wistfulness to Alex behind all his roguish antics. The irony here lies in the fact that even if Sahil was not a man, this film would still be just as affecting. It would still be as furtive and inaudible. It would still be about first and last glances, about close-ups of turmoil-ridden faces at airports and in roofless cars. And it would still be spelled as LOEV .

The writer is a freelance film critic, writer, and habitual solo traveller