A Despicable Ugly Squalid View Of Womanhood

I will be honest. I hated Sister Midnight. It is one of the most seriously loathsome films on slum life, injected with heavy doses of sickening surrealism, and of course, there is Radhika Apte, every Smita Patil fanboy-director’s favourite whacked dream.

I am tired of watching Ms Apte’s strong-woman-in-a-sticky-situation act (admittedly very competently staged). There are weak women out there who also need a voice, as Apte’s actor-sisters Tillotama Shome and Amruta Subhash have recently shown us articulately.

Radhika Apte in Sister Midnight is choked with rage. She is like the pipe in the washbasin, clogged with filth. She plays Uma, a fact that I didn’t know until we were much into morbid loose-motion pictures. For lengthy patches, writer-director Karan Kandhari doesn’t allow his characters to speak. Or is it that the characters don’t allow the director to have a say? They seem to take over the storytelling and hold it hostage at grim points.

Although the film is described as a dark comedy, I saw no humour in Uma’s nocturnal activities which included collecting rodents and storing them in her hideous chawl. Even when it’s not night (and that’s very rare) Uma is seething, hyper-ventilating, raging, puking… oh yes, there is a lot of puking on screen inside that little ugly hovel (art director, take a bow) where the newly married Uma vomits abuses at her surprisingly tolerant and patient husband Gopal (played as a one-note marionette by Ashok Pathak).

Even when Gopal stumbles into his wretched chawl room drunk he doesn’t lay a hand on his wife who howls and bellows like an animal trapped in a cage. What is Uma is so angry about? Is she illustrative of that prototype of The Woman Who Shrieks Against Her Karma? Maybe Gopal should be less patient. After a point, the audience gets impatient with Gopal’s patience.

At one point, Gopal turns in naked anguish to Uma to say, “Sometimes I don’t understand you.”

Our sentiments. What is Uma raging against? If it is her fate, then we don’t get it. Her slum-dog act is hollow and extremely grating on the nerves. Writer-director Karan Kandhari offers the protagonist no reprieve from her ceaseless fury. The sisterhood Uma shares with her neighbour Sheetal (Chhaya Kadam, typecast as a hardboiled culinary slum-dweller) is given no room to grow beyond a few hurried cooking lessons and sex prattle. If the sisters in All We Imagine As Light were numbskulls, they would all be a part of Sister Midnight.

The suffocating narrative gets overpowering after a point. Cinematographer Sverre Sørdal shoots Uma as a nocturnal animal out of her cage, prowling, and growling, Uma is a toothless tigress baying for blood. She is neither intimidating nor intriguing: just plain exhausting.

Some of the night-time mise en scene conveys a howling disingenuousness. The characters are all a brackish blur. Who are those women on the streets who welcome Uma with ingratiating flirtatiousness calling her chikni (!) and all that? Are they sex workers, eunuchs or both? Director Kandhari has no interest in knowing anyone closely, not even Uma whom the plot portrays as a raging wolf. There is no attempt to explore Uma’s desolation beyond the prowling and growling. I have not seen any film where the maker is contemptuous of his protagonist.

As the narrative progresses it gets increasingly dark and ugly, spewing venom and viciousness like a dragon with loose motions. Then there is the music. Why on earth does the soundtrack have a Brit baritone in the background singing in angrezi while Uma wallows in her squalor? A concession to firangi audiences who may find the smelly ambience too much to take? If you want to be thrown in a half-open cesspit with no way out, go right ahead.