‘Lovers in the Blue Light’ Venice Review: Love in the Shadows of Mumbai

In the new film by the director of Songs of Forgotten Trees —who won the Best Director prize in this very Orizzonti section last year— four Indian migrants become entangled in one another’s lives amid the vast sprawl of Mumbai, with love, desire, and fear at the heart of the story. What binds them together is the night: the city’s dark, dangerous corners and the troubled people who inhabit them. But ultimately, what they’re all searching for is love and a way to overcome loneliness.

Ameena and Karim are an unusual married couple who have recently arrived in the city. Unusual because Karim is gay, they don’t have sex, and their relationship seems to rest on a mixture of compassion, companionship, and shared grief. The village they came from was devastated by flooding, and both lost everything. In Mumbai, however, their lives begin to diverge. Ameena finds work at a phone sex service, talking to clients for money. Karim, meanwhile, becomes fascinated by Sukka, a burglar who breaks into apartments and eventually draws him into his criminal world.

Gradually, Karim and Sukka begin to defy social taboos and deepen their forbidden relationship, one that carries enormous risks in contemporary India. At the same time, Ameena develops feelings for Omram, her pimp, who —like most of the film’s male characters— projects an image of toughness while masking profound loneliness. Another secret romance takes shape, even as Ameena and Karim continue living together, pretending nothing has changed. Eventually, for a variety of reasons, that façade becomes impossible to maintain.

Roy’s film is markedly different from her previous one: more ambitious but also more unwieldy, narratively demanding and populated by characters who are difficult to connect with, especially Karim and Sukka. For all the undeniable boldness of depicting scenes that remain highly unusual in Indian cinema —a romance between two men portrayed with uncommon physical intimacy— the pair are abrasive, emotionally damaged figures whose development never becomes particularly compelling. The performances don’t help, nor does the overly emphatic score that accompanies their scenes.

The film is at its strongest when it focuses on Ameena. She’s a warmer, more hesitant, more romantic character, someone who reads love letters while working in a deeply seedy environment —a striking contrast given her apparent religiosity. Less verbose than the men around her (she speaks halting, imperfect Hindi) and treated with greater subtlety, her half of the story gives Lovers in the Blue Night a more affecting emotional register. Even so, the film never lands with the force it clearly aims for. What remains are a handful of strong ideas, scattered memorable moments, and one genuinely sympathetic character in a 105-minute film that rarely manages to forge an emotional connection with its audience.