As cinematographer-directed director Shanker Raman’s first film Gurgaon was a slow-burning, brooding neo-noir, his new film Love Hostel is the complete opposite. The Zee5 release is so fast, it could easily have been better with an extra 30 minutes. Characters feel underdeveloped. Plot developments are becoming urgent. Revelations thrown in to make characters run smoothly go nowhere. Love Hostel feels almost like an imperfect movie.
After all, an attempt was made to make a movie that would go at the same speed as bullets and bodies fall in this slick 90-minute thriller. Does it work? This is usually no exception to the action sequences brilliantly choreographed by Amritpal Singh.
Set in Haryana, Love Hostel follows a newly married interfaith couple, Ahmed Vikrant Massey and Jyoti Sanya Malhotra, who seek refuge in a safe house of the government. It is a facility that provides secret accommodation to same-sex couples who may be harmed by their parents or communities after they go to court for protection.
Jyoti’s grandmother, MLA Kamala Dilawar (Swaroopa Ghosh), is deeply annoyed by the happiness of Ahmed and Jyoti. Kamala is a traditionalist and wants to bring Jyoti back home so he can kill her. She hires Dagar (Bobby Deol), a crazy hitman with a distorted face, to track down Ahmed and Jyoti. Dagars are very enthusiastic about hunting down couples who marry against the wishes of their parents. It’s about an incident from his past that, when it was revealed at the end of the movie, really wanted to rip my hair out.
Chunks of Love Hostel is so loosely written, I suspect the makers held a gun to Raman’s head to finish the film in an unreasonably short time. Or maybe the movie was edited too much to make sure the runtime was 90 minutes flat.
But because Raman’s filmmaking is so conscious, as seen in Gurgaon, it’s hard to believe that everything in Love Hostel is a mistake.
Love Hostel, written by Shankar Raman, Mehak Jamal and Yogi Singha, reminded me of Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men (2007), as there are many elements in the plot, only one of which is a is very conscientious hitman.
There’s a hero who joins the bad guys and is on the run with the bag of money.
Days, of course. Deol is enough in the role. He has little to do other than suggest a threatening presence. There is also a good policeman Sushil Rathi Raj Arjun, who is the moral center of the film, who tracks down both the hero and the villain.
Other things that reminded me of No Country for Old Men were a tracking device that Anton Chigurh used to locate his targets. Love Hostel also has a shootout scene similar to the one between Chigurh and Llewellyn Moss at the hotel. This scene in Love Hostel is brilliantly done. The cinematography of Vivek Shah makes these few minutes look super grits and brilliant. In these parts, Massey really seems like an action hero. He was the most influential element for me at Love Hostel. They really need to consider making intelligent action movies.
Overall, Love Hostel has nothing interesting or serious to say about interfaith or inter-caste couples. There’s a gay couple in the movie, but it could just be heterosexual. It seems like the authors wanted to make a point, but they could not or would not. The priority here was to make the number one tight thriller. For that, the parts of Love Hostel are really well made. But the sum of its parts does not really work. The film needed better writing, so all of these characters, especially Dagar, appeared human and not cardboard cut out.
Love Hostel
Director: Shanker Raman
Cast: Sanya Malhotra, Vikrant Massey and Bobby Deol
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