The Cycle of Love

In the 1960s and ’70s, a tide of eccentrically-dressed Westerners flowed East along the hippie trail, hunting for enlightenment as they trundled through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan to India and beyond (before the Russian invasion put a violent end to all that peace and love). Far fewer people looked for spiritual fulfilment in the opposite direction. But this beautifully imaginative hybrid documentary, executive-produced by Priyanka Chopra, is dedicated to telling the story of one of them: PK, an Indian portrait artist who fell in love with a Swedish tourist, and set off on an impossible journey to find his destiny.

British director Orlando von Einsiedel (The White Helmets) foregrounds interviews with this story’s central couple: PK himself, who revisits his impetuous youth over chai from a Delhi roadside seller, and Lotta, who recalls their passionate affair with enjoyably Nordic understatement in the muted Swedish countryside. When PK was born, a soothsayer foretold that he would meet a woman from over the sea – a Taurus, with musical flair. So when he sketches Lotta’s portrait one day, and discovers that she is all those things, the future seems to be written in the stars. She heads home – and, too broke to buy a train ticket, he follows her by bicycle, with no map, and only $80, art materials, and some dried fruit to sustain him on this treacherous pedal-powered journey through inhospitable deserts and snowy mountains. 

Clearly, he survived. But von Einsiedel artfully restores the peril to this tale by turning it into a will-they-won't-they love story, splicing present day interviews with reimagined scenes from 1977. Chirag Lobo shines with open-hearted optimism as a young PK, who pursues Lotta in a way that feels quixotically devoted, rather than uncomfortably persistent. And Mina Dale brings both reserve and passion to the part of freespirited Lotta, who's brave enough to embark on a three day train ride to the home village of a man she's just met.

Despite its bleaker notes, this is a story for optimists

What makes PK risk so much to find Lotta again? It feels like it’s not just love and destiny, heady as those drugs might be. There’s also a sense that she’s the first person who’s been able to see him for who he is – as a human being, not an untouchable member of the Dalit caste he was born into. Von Einsiedel carefully adds in the cultural context here, in conversations where Dalit people discuss being hounded out of town, or beaten for daring to step outside their oppressed existences. ‘No one will ask my caste or tribe,’ says PK, jubilantly, when he finally reaches Europe – but then he’s racially profiled by guards who humiliatingly rake through his bag of sweat-soaked cycling clothes, and threaten to send him right back to where he started.  

Despite its bleaker notes, this is a story for optimists. Again and again, PK escapes disaster through his sheer charm and idealism. Strangers can’t help helping this wide-eyed man who’s utterly committed to a woman he barely knows. Some viewers might find it too much, too sweet – but abandon yourself to this nostalgic evocation of a lost era and it’s hard not to fall in love. 

In UK and Ireland cinemas Sep 18.