It is St Valentine's Day 1981. A slight young woman wearing red lipstick and cradling a Sten gun leads a gang of men into the village of Behmai in India's Uttar Pradesh state. She demands that the villagers bring out the brothers Sing, a couple of rival dacoits, or bandits. The young woman is implacably angry, and becomes more so when the terrified villagers will not or cannot comply. She orders her gang to line up all the young men, then walks along the line, spitting on the men, insulting them and jabbing the butt of her weapon into their testicles. Still no-one has seen the bandit brothers. The women cry and scream. An order is given – perhaps by the girl, a low-caste outlaw named Phoolan Devi – perhaps by another of her gang. The young men are made to walk single file towards the river where they are forced to kneel as they beg for mercy.

Twenty-three years later, a white-masked French electrical worker fumbles through the fuse box of a rundown apartment block in the predawn darkness of St Denis, near Paris. Eventually he finds the right connections and electricity returns to the squalid suburban flat whose occupants have been unable to pay their bills. ‘I give power back to the poor’ the disguised man claims.