Sister Midnight — Cannes 2024 Movie Review — Sucharita Tyagi
All right so up next from Cannes, let’s take a look at Karan Kandahari’s wildly amusing and fun Sister Midnight, starring Radhika Apte in the lead role.
Iggy Pop ka gaana hai Sister Midnight jisko likha tha saath mein David Bowie ne, and if you pay close attention to the lyrics you’ll find it’s about a man plagued by intrusive thoughts and hoping for the darkness of the night to come and help him escape his own head.
Borrowing its title from the song, Karan Kandhari’s film is exploration of a woman slowly losing her mind TO her intrusive thoughts. It sort of reads to me like a filmmaker wondering joh mental health ya existential issues “ameer logon ke chonchle” kahe jaate hain, who agar kisi gareeb ko ho toh? Will we still classify them as as ‘quirky and edgy’, attributes we ascribe to characters like Bella Baxter in Poor Things, ya hum unko uss hi ghrina ki nazar se dekhenge jis se…well gareeb logon ko dekhte hain hum Mumbai jaise shehron mein. Ki kyun sadak kinaare footpath occupy karke jhopdiyaan bana lete hain, gaanv waapas nahi jaate. 3 foot ke kamre ke andar rehne ki mental cost kya hoti hai, does one even want to bother finding out?
Interestingly, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light is also asking a similar question, except in dono filmon ki tone mein zameen asmaan ka farak hai, both insightful in their own ways. Mera review of THAT Grand Prix winning film, you can watch here.
Uma and Gopal are a newlywed couple. Gopal who has a daily wage job at a factory, lives in a one room kholi built on a footpath in a colony that is exclusively made of kholis built on footpaths. Uma is new to the city and doesn’t know anyone. Arranged marriage hai, hence there is little to no romance in their lives. Bored out of her mind, one day Uma decides to step out of the house and go on an adventure, then sort of gets into an adventure per day routine as she realizes the harmony and similarities she has with this crazy city’s she’s just been dumped in the middle of.
Sister Midnight is unlike any “Mumbai film” I’ve ever….heard, no one has soundtracked the city like this before. It also LOOKS different, coupled with its director’s very specific vision and cinematographer Sverre Sørdal’s sharp frames, its more Fallen Angels than Life In a Metro, as far as movies about a city go. Amidst movement and chaos, Mumbai is the perfect city to explore a mind running amok, while dealing with loneliness and overwhelmed with too much all at once.
Radhika Apte as Uma, is simply excellent, and just the perfect amount of weird. Towards its third act, the film falters, and doesn’t QUITE know what to do with Uma, where to lead her, and sort of clunkily abandons her, but Radhika is just so captivating, the film remains very watchable, despite its indecisiveness. Chhaya Kadam, as a mentor-y neighbor is splendid in her short screen time, despite it being a part she can play in her sleep at this point. Ashok Pathak, the husband Gopal, is hilariously pitiable as the “man” named after a god, like the woman he has married, but straight up unable to handle pretty much anything life or the world throws at him, leading him to some rather, unpleasant sticky places. His too is a top-notch performance, Karan Kandhari indeed is skilled at getting his actors to catch perfectly the weirdly disjointed rhythm his screenplay is following.
There’s absolutely no way to predict when or where this bizarre film, that ALSO has a tonne of stop-motion animation, will be available to watch in India but I recommend you keep it on your radar.
