By Peter Keough

Orlando von Einsiedel’s documentary follows an Indian portrait artist’s extraordinary bicycle journey from Delhi to Sweden—and the improbable love story that inspired it.

The Cycle of Love, directed by Orlando von Einsiedel. At the Coolidge Corner Theatre and West Newton Cinema.

Chirag Benedict Lobo in scene from The Cycle of Love. Photo: MUBI

Recent years have seen their share of documentaries about refugees driven from ravaged homelands, having to endure perilous hardships and they ventured toward unknown fates in unwelcoming foreign countries. Not so the story of P. K. Mahanandia, a 23-year-old Indian man determined to travel to Sweden from Delhi. But this is not a flight from disaster — it is the only way to reunite with a woman whom he believed to be his soul mate.

Not that P.K.’s life in India was without hardship. He was born into the Dalit, or “Untouchable,” caste and as such was shunned and denied basic rights. Regardless, his parents loved him and took him as an infant to an astrologer who read his horoscope and prophesied that “[He would] marry a girl who is not from the village, not even from this country, she will be musical, own a jungle and be born under the sign of the ox [Taurus].”

Nonetheless, his Dalit identity poisoned every joy, hope, act of faith, and aspiration with an unshakable sense of worthlessness. To escape his small town’s oppression, he fled to Delhi, where anonymity concealed his caste origins. Taught to draw by his mother, he earned money sketching street portraits—and proved as gifted at listening to his subjects’ stories as at capturing their likenesses. One client was Lotta von Schedvin, a Swedish tourist who, in 1975, was charmed by P.K.’s innocence, charisma, and uncanny knowledge of her life, gleaned from an astrologer.

Lotta, meanwhile, had grown up in bourgeois comfort in the rural Swedish town of Borås. But it was the ’70s: she was restless and moved to London, embraced its countercultural life, and happened upon a postcard depicting one of the colossal wheel carvings at the Konark Sun Temple. The image captivated her. So, when friends invited her to join a van trip to India, she eagerly accepted. Signs and serendipity thus led her, too, to her fateful meeting with P.K. in Delhi.

They were instantly smitten. After a week of bliss, Lotta returned home, promising to come back soon. After two years passed without word from her, P.K. set out for Sweden himself—like a real-life variant of David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999), though on a bicycle. Undaunted, he embarked on a nearly 6,000-mile journey across deserts, mountains, and occasionally hostile borders.

Now in their 70s, the two recount their story in an ominous he-said, she-said structure, speaking from separate locations—Lotta in Sweden, P.K. in Delhi. Their recollections are intercut with reenactments—not always the most effective way to dramatize the past, but done subtly here. The limpid chartreuse, tangerine, and pink tints lend these scenes a fairy-tale quality, recalling Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (2007). So does the casting: Chirag Benedict Lobo and Mina Dale give nuanced, affecting performances as younger versions of the couple, and bear an uncanny resemblance to Dev Patel and Elle Fanning. This may be the romanticizing mist of memory, but as the lovers’ recollections converge with the flashbacks’ climactic events, a question gathers force: Are these idealized versions illusory, or do they disclose a hidden truth?

P.K. has the more riveting story to tell, though some of the countries along his route were less war-ravaged and tyrannically ruled then than they are now. He was traveling the inverse of the era’s so-called “hippie trail,” along which young adventurers like Lotta could drive a VW bus from Europe to Asia on the cheap. But a poor young Indian traveling by bicycle, earning his living solely by sketching portraits, had no such privilege. A journey of thousands of miles is perilous even under the best circumstances. Yet whenever P.K. encounters an obstacle, a stranger’s kindness bails him out—or, ironically, he interrupts his quest to help someone else, only to benefit from that act later. Often, he meets these guardian angels while drawing their portraits. In one poignant episode, recalling the Nausicaa episode in the Odyssey, he awakens starving and despondent on the shore of the Caspian Sea, where beautiful young women—Iranian medical students on a picnic—revive him.

In his documentaries, including the Oscar-nominated Virunga (2014) and Oscar-winning short The White Helmets (2016), von Einsiedel has confronted cruelty and injustice by focusing on heroic figures who quixotically defended their convictions. Here, he had a different kind of story in mind. “I’ve spent much of my life making films which give glimpses into humanity’s darker sides,” he has said of the film, “but I feel we also need stories that celebrate our commonalities and pull us together—probably now more than ever!”

That sounds like an invitation to sentimentality and false optimism, and at times The Cycle of Love does fall back on platitudes to make its case. But here those platitudes are earned. When P.K. says, “Now I know you can choose which story to believe about yourself,” we suspect that, whatever the outcome, he has chosen well.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He was the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, including Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2013) and For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).