Marriage is not often presented in cinema as a bowl of mangoes, but it’s rarely shown as so morbidly strange as in this reckless corker of a debut feature written and directed by Karan Kandhari, and backed by Film4.
We meet the newly hitched – that is, thrown together – Uma and Gopal on a train to their new marital home (a small hut) on the ragged edges of today’s Mumbai. She sits bolt upright in the carriage behind her wedding veil; he is slumped out cold beside her. The wedding night is equally indecorous. As she starts to undress, he hurtles out the door as if he’s seen a scorpion. It sets the tone for a delinquent comedy, full of the kind of toybox playfulness and degeneracy that perhaps only a relatively novice film-maker can run down the alley with.
The quirky, punchy movie consists of dozens of small tableaux of baleful stares and occasional bursts of acid dialogue. “Men are dim. Just throw in enough chili and salt and they’ll eat anything,” the hapless new cook Uma is told by a neighbour. Uma is excellently played with just-go-for-it ferocity by Radhika Apte; she’s an all-devouring reductio ad absurdum of the woman’s picture. The drunken goof Gopal (Ashok Pathak) emits equally committed sullenness. They knew each other as children and were matched up because everyone else rejected him and “she’s just insane”, according to a gossiper in the know.
Outside of their sexless union, filled with bickering and swearing, Uma escapes into stealing pot plants and giving away other people’s dogs. She also flees to the far reaches of downtown Mumbai, where she finds a cleaning job and the silent company of a gloomy lift operator who sleeps in his elevator on a roof as the lights of the smoky metropolis wink below. Traipsing back and forth with her bucket and mop, Uma finds more sociable solace amid a cheery group of brightly sari’d street women.
If this is a story to place with All We Imagine as Light, another Mumbai-traversing female-empowerment story this awards season, Sister Midnight takes us away from naturalism into David Lynch territory. Instead of Eraserhead’s lady in a radiator, we have dead birds coming to life under a bed and a yomping troupe of stop-motion goats pursuing Uma night and day. Yes, indeed – Ray Harryhausen-style stop-motion goats crankily embedded in the frame.
They correlate with Uma’s descent into a shocked-haired mind fog, and not a little depravity, in the second half of the film, which includes leaving the gormless Gopal in a sub-mortal state after a long-awaited consummation of their nuptials. This all-out crackers phase, complete with a mummy in a shopping trolley and acts of vampirism, vibe-checks films by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (Everything Everywhere All at Once) and at one point pays direct homage to the works of Akira Kurosawa.
The visual side of Kandhari’s film is at once abrupt and lush. A frequently backed-off, locked-off camera seems a nod to the oddly judgemental gaze of silent movies, and the palette of the film, even by Indian standards, is wonderful – colours are deep-dyed and contrasty, like those of the American photographer Gregory Crewdson (The film is shot by Sverre Sørdal and the colourist is James Slattery). The soundtrack samples everything from Asian pop to Howlin’ Wolf, Marty Robbins, The Stooges and T. Rex, with a score by Interpol’s Paul Banks.
There’s repetitiveness in Kandhari’s film, to be sure, and not all his gags work, but there’s also madness with a purpose in this bitingly facetious offering. Both marriage and ritual are rejected and then embraced, and an act of death becomes a sign of very tainted love.
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