The lip-lock was part of the song: Bilahari

‘Don’t fall in love. Fall off a bridge, it hurts less’, reads a quote. Over the years, cinema has given us various interpretations of heartbreaks, starting from Devdas to the very recent Arjun Reddy — men who lose themselves into the vortex of depression after losing a battle with love. Bilahari wished to capture the same emotion after reading a Facebook post and ended up bringing out the music video Haram (Ecstasy). The song shows how falling in and out of love has its own effects on each of them. What made this song different from the previous Malayalam heartbreak music videos is that it has an unabashed lip-lock scene.

Released this week, the song has already hit over 2 lakh views and soaring ahead shares.  Director Bilahari says that the idea to make such a music video struck him when he himself was struggling through a phase of depression. “At this time, I happened to come across a friend’s Facebook post which read how a woman hands over the string of her emotions to man’s hand when she falls in love and that it’s not the other way round where he takes it from her. It was an empowering write up about women and I love themes that deal with women empowerment. The post inspired me and I wanted to try out something with it.”

The song Haram rendered by Mujeeb Majeed and Devika Ashok was penned by Vineeth Vasudevan. It also has lines from the Facebook post that inspired it. “There was no plan for a song initially. It was just background score with the lines from the post as voice over. But once the visuals were ready, we realised that the entire idea was getting conveyed even without the voice over. So we completed the work by adding in the important lines from the post as voiceover at various points.”

Dubsmash-fame Vishnu Unnikrishnan plays the male lead and Megha Mathew plays the female lead in the video. Musician Govind Menon performs a solo violin for the song composed by Mujeeb Majeed. Speaking about the much discussed lip-lock scene, Bilahari says, “The lip-lock was part of the song right from the start. I have to thank the actors first. It is not easy to agree to something like this here, that too for a music video. I felt that a lip-lock can represent every aspect of a relationship. I wanted to connect the visuals to reality which is why that scene was included.” He adds, “We never promoted the song based on the lip-lock. This is something people have to get used to watching on screen, one step at a time.”