Loev

Sudhanshu Saria's first feature, Loev, takes its title from a deliberate misspelling of a word everyone knows, and the error is the point. The film premiered at South by Southwest in March 2015 and spent two years moving through festivals before Netflix picked up worldwide streaming rights in April 2017 and launched it that May. It runs 90 minutes, was shot in Hindi and English, and was produced by Four Line Films and Bombay Berlin Film.

Shiv Panditt plays Jai, a Wall Street dealmaker who carves 48 hours out of a business trip to Mumbai. Dhruv Ganesh plays Sahil, a music producer who drops his weekend plans, and his boyfriend Alex (Siddharth Menon), to drive Jai into the hills of Maharashtra. What follows is a road trip built from conversation and silence in roughly equal measure. Rishab Chadha appears as Junior.

The film arrived at a moment when Indian independent cinema was beginning to address gay desire without apology or allegory, and reviewers tended to note both its restraint and its discomfort. Saria keeps the camera close and the dialogue naturalistic, letting the audience decide what the two men are actually saying to each other. The result is a small film with an unusually sharp aftertaste. [edit]

An argument is already underway when the audience arrives. Sahil, a music producer in his twenties, is snapping at his boyfriend Alex over something small, and the friction tells us more about Sahil's state of mind than any exposition could. He is irritable, disenchanted, and not especially happy in the life he has assembled. Then his phone rings, and the name on it changes his mood entirely.

Jai is flying in. A dealmaker based in New York, Jai has built a life of smooth transactions and well-cut suits, and he has decided to spend a free weekend in Mumbai with the friend he has known longer than almost anyone. Sahil drops everything. The two men load a car and head out of the city, away from the traffic and the noise, into the hills and canyons of Maharashtra.

The film settles into a rhythm of long takes and unhurried conversation. Jai teases. Sahil deflects. They eat, they drive, they stop at viewpoints, and the ease between them keeps sliding into something more charged. A joke lands a little too close to the bone. A hand rests a moment too long. Saria refuses to underline any of it, which means the audience spends most of the runtime reading subtext and second-guessing itself.

Jai is the forward one. He pushes at the edges of the friendship, testing what he can say and how Sahil will answer. Sahil, tethered to Alex and to a version of adulthood he is not sure he chose, pulls back and then, briefly, stops pulling. The weekend becomes a test of honesty about desire and about the stories people tell themselves to avoid admitting what they want. Alex is present mostly as an absence, a fact of Sahil's life that neither man can quite ignore.

By the final stretch the question has sharpened into something the film will not let either character dodge: is this a reunion, a confession, or a goodbye? The answer arrives in a way that reframes everything that came before it.[edit]