Kaavya Krishna (Paoli Dam) is an investigative reporter who tonight has a vital new lead, so she meets up with her photographer Vicky (Nikhil Dwivedi) and they rush off to a hotel where an illicit business deal is taking place behind closed doors. The doors may be closed, but the curtains are not and the duo contrive to snap a few photos via a camera on a stick lowered from the balcony above. Soon their story is breaking all over India and the corporation involved is exposed, specifically the man at the heart of the illegal activities, boss’s son Siddarth Dhanrajgir (Gulshan Devaiah), has been shamed. But he is not going to take this lying down, and telling Kaavya he was impressed with her reporting, he gives her a high-paying job…
“You Will Judge This Film Openly Yet Watch It Secretly” winked the tagline to the first in the Hate Story franchise, one which sought to take Bollywood into new areas, where the previously taboo kissing scenes were leapfrogged into further scandal with actual sex scenes. Director Vivek Agnihotri reckoned without the iron grip of the censors who saw to it those sequences were toned down to be as mild as possible, so while the would-be daring F-bombs survived, there was only a hint of nudity rather than the explicitness you would get in other markets, though that said the proliferation of sex scenes in movies from the West had significantly dwindled by the point this was trying to get in on the act – the act of 1973, perhaps. As with many movies seeking an excuse for sexual content, this was a neo-noir.
Only with a Bollywood twist that saw a high degree of conservatism confuse matters. The traditional femme fatale may be prone to punishment at the end of the films presenting them, depending on the morality of the piece, but by the eighties and nineties there was a tendency to revel in their antics as they wrapped men around their little fingers, even allowing them to get away with it after a fashion. With Hate Story, on the other hand, our femme fatale was very much the wronged woman, to a horrendous degree, which made her scheming more sympathetic since she was trying her best to get her own back on the man who had ruined her life, and that man was Siddarth who didn’t wish her to prosper at his business at all.
There was actually a lot of the business side of things in the plot, as if the filmmakers were saying okay, the sex is all very well, but there are some serious implications to major corporate fraud you should really be considering instead. So overinvolved with this angle does the narrative become that it’s as if Basic Instinct had been distracted by the marketing of Catherine Trammell’s novels, or Walter Neff’s insurance work back at the office began to take precedent over the mix up with his latest client’s extra-curricular activities in Double Indemnity. By the grand finale, any thought of steaminess had been replaced by Kaavya’s financial exposure of an even bigger scandal, though not one which made a tremendous amount of sense when there would have been no way the villains would have gotten away with it for about five seconds after anyone took a look at them.
Before all that, Paoli Dam had to show us what she was made of as an ambassador for pushing boundaries in Bollywood, albeit still compromised (though she would appear nude in a sex scene elsewhere). She managed to be sympathetic even without the horrible fate Siddartha conjured up for her, so afterwards you really wanted to see Kaavya succeed, yet why she didn’t go to the police and rather than that became the most sought after prostitute in India so she could sleep her way to the top of the corporate tree, went unexplained. Possibly because the film would have been over within about a fifth of the time a Bollywood effort would usually take, but this rattled along for about half of its length until it developed feet of lead and began to get bogged down in the implications of its heroine’s endeavours. This led to an ending that smacked of a massive cop-out as it was plain they couldn’t allow her to get away with her whole scheme, but to bring about that its last scene was reactionary to a near-offensive degree, suggesting Bollywood needed a whole lot more than raunch to mature to the level its director wished. Music by Harshit Maxeena.
