RADHIKA APTE IN SISTER MIDNIGHT

A feisty young bride set down in Mumbai without a user's manual

At 44, British Indian filmmaker Karan Kandhari has drawn justifiable favorable attention with his almost-debut feature Sister Midnight, after a trilogy of admired short films and 20 years since his student film Bye Bye Goodnight, a featiure debut which now seems little remembered but was praised by BBC Film's David Parkinson as "a uniquely avant-garde snapshot of modern urban India" and a "visually ambitious road movie." That film took a "daydreaming Mumbai cabby" and a "pregnant, hitchhiking free spirit" where they would go. Something like that happens with Uma (the limber, durable and fearless Radhika Apte) as a country bride sent to an arranged marriage with the everyman Gopal (Ashok Pathak), someone she last knew at the age of eight. Uma and Gopal are set to live in a primitive one-room street-front apartment, a shack, really, on what appears to be the middle of a Mumbai marketeplace.

Quietly, and by stages, all hell breaks loose in this nightmare dramady satire of marriage. Or is this a portrait of madness or witchcraft? Or of the inherent absurdity of this most incongrous of cities? Working with a striking simplicity and limited dialogue in his sequences of gradually unexpected scenes, Kandhari lets things flow imperceptibly in different directions, drawing (it felt) on Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch--though it's Robert Altman he has named as his major influence--and making one ponder what on earth the Jean Renoir of The River or Satjayit Ray would think or say of this radical transformation of everyday India on film. This is continually inventive and fresh, though it doesn't quite know where it's going or what it's added up to when it's done. Most of the way Kandhari gets away with this, though.

I don't think Kandhari is really critiquing arranged marriages in India. The use of this premise is more basic than that and as much a reference to traditional Indian cinema and to basic movie themes, and a desire to play with what he sees as the successfully clashing "mishmash" of poor Mumbai (including a Buddhist nuns' monastery), and make people laugh. "When people laugh it's the greatest high," Kandhari has said in Q&A's and interviews. He acknowledges it took ten years to finish, and it's a miracle he even got this film out there to audiences because, after all, as he frankly acknowledges of his film, "it's pretty fucking weird." He has summed it up as being a film about not having a how-to manual about how to do anything. It may help, by the way, to know Kandhari has said this film is "kind of an ode to John Walters and Divine, though he has named a number of other inspirations as well.

Uma is feisty and foul-mouthed, and has no idea how to carry out the role of a traditional housewife Gopal seems to expect of her. Sometimes she'll accept help, as from her older female neighbor Sheetal (Chhaya Kadam), who teaches her the rudiments of cooking: take beans or rice, add spices, and chop vegetables in big pieces so he'll think he's getting well fed ("men are dumb").

Yes, men are dumb, and they are schlubs. Gopal is, anyway, He goes around in his undershirt, hangs out mostly drinking with male colleagues after work, and isn't even around much for Uma. He does make a diagram on the floor to show her how to plan the week's household expenditures. He is unenlightened but kind, not mean: he doesn't question her rude talk or lack of accomplishment or blanch when she lights up a cigarette.

She's bored, so she takes the only job she can do, janitorial service, mopping up in a building. But it's miles, or as a kindly older man tells her, "a four-hour walk," away. He takes her halfway on his bike. Another odd pedestrian sequence occurs when Gopal misses a train, and runs all the way on foot to catch up with the one Uma is riding on instead of waiting for the next one as a sensible person would have done. Later Gopal is invited to the beach with another couple ("Just a guy I know at work") and they go. Uma is not amused, so she asks if she can take the couple's dog for a walk. She gives the dog to the first kid she meets. Uma and Gopal wind up running away to escape the irate couple.

This caper creates a sense of complicity, which perhaps is also a turn-on. Uma annlunces they are friends, and friends can hug--which apparently leads to sex. Are they a real couple now? No, because there is an undercurrent of deranged behavior by Uma such as her treatment of birds, and a clutch of small stop-motion goats she has trouble getting rid of. Rumors begin to circulate in the neighborhood--who knows just why, but then again why not?--that Uma is a witch.

There is an unforced simplicity in the steady succession of wacky scenes that works very well. The score by Paul Banks makes drolly incongruous use of American songs, starting with a funky old Black blues, some later on of a Western flavor, and this offbeat score helps significantly to prepare us for the sui generis tone of the aciton. Banks relies a bit too much on musical cues toward the end, somewhat overwhelming the distinctly minimalist style. What does work throughout to make this confident little film succeed is the cinematography by the Norwegian Sverre Sørdal and the sharp editing of Napoleon Stratogiannakis, who's originally from Greece.

In the end things become nightmarish, and particularly dire for Gopal. Uma winds up by herself on a train going somewhere far away - and herewith Karan Kandhari joins the ranks of the quirky small geniuses of cinema. Perhaps another time he'll deliver a film in which he wrangles his sequences in a more firmly controlled manner and forges an ending that more clearly fulfils the opening passages. Or maybe not. Maybe absurdity is just so innate to this fimmaker that incongruity is his highest goal. I thought of Roy Andersson. But for all the models, sources and analogues he has named and we can think of, coming from India, Karan Kandhari is an original.

Th entire film is in Hindi, with excellent English subtitles.

Sister Midnight, 107 mins., debuted at Cannes Directors' Fortnight May 19, 2024, following with festivals at Hamburg, Zurich, Leiden, Stiges, BFI London (triple-nominated for an outstanding debut award), São Paulo, Philadelphia, AFI, Denver, Stockholm, and more. US theatrical opening by Magnet May 16, 2025. Metacritic rating: 73%.


RADHIKA APTE IN SISTER MIDNIGHT

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.