Hate Story is a stylish, hard-edged revenge drama. Crisply shot and set in Delhi, with lots of on-location shooting, Hate Story has a very contemporary vibe, having been written and produced by Vikram Bhatt with direction from Vivek Agnihotri. There is a lot about this film that appeals. Paoli Dam, a Bengali actor in her first Bollywood role, is excellent as Kavyah Krishnan, an investigative journalist is who is wronged by the wealthy heir to an industrial fortune, Siddharth Dhanrajgir, played by Gulshan Devaiya.
While the film has some good moments and gives you a rich sense of place, the gritty realism is undermined by some implausible plot twists. Although Kavyah’s motives for revenge are clearly (and traumatically) established, her decision to become a prostitute in order to achieve her goal is less obvious and not clearly explained. And, apart from one excellent scene, late on in the film, where she answers the door of her (expensive) farmhouse in a scantily clad and dissolute repose, we don’t really get much sense of how her trauma and subsequent life change has affected her.
Perhaps this lack of introspection and detail is because the decision to turn Kavyah into a sex worker is simply a plot device, a means to an end, a way to include more skin and sex in an otherwise straightforward plot. After all, hate Story is billed as an “erotic-thriller” and contains scenes which would have been unimaginable in a mainstream Bollywood film until very recently. Still, the “sex” scenes don’t really sizzle or challenge much, drawing heavily from the sweaty, abstractly aerobic late 80s style of flicks like 9 1/2 weeks. Ironically the scenes say little and mostly just add cheap visual entertainment to the story, much like the worst dance routines which are now increasingly out of fashion in Bollywood.
While challenging cultural norms and audience expectations is a good thing, as seems to happen in other similar films to come out of India recently, this boldness comes at the expense of telling a story well. This is a shame, because in many other ways, Hate Story has high production values and some great moments.
