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One of the most powerful scenes in Sister Midnight is also a quiet and unexpected one. The protagonist, Uma, sits idly with her neighbour Sheetal outside their adjoining homes in Mumbai. To pass the time, the bored housewives pretend to be divorcing one another. Amid the role play, Uma turns to her confidant and says: “I’m tainted goods, I’m a divorcee. But it’s OK. I’ll wear this like a badge and go forth to the hills, form a manless nation and build a monolithic altar to the pussy.”
The statement captures what is so provocative about the film – it turns societal norms on their head and dares to ask: what if we did things differently? At its core, the film feels quite feminist. “That word comes up a lot,” says director Karan Kandhari. “I’m happy people can see the film like that, but I didn’t set out to make something with an agenda. I would say the film is actually punk rock because it questions things that don’t make sense. Just because something is tradition or old doesn’t mean it’s right.”
The film, Kandhari’s debut feature, premiered at Cannes and was nominated for outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer at this year’s Baftas.
It is a surreal comedy about a young bride, Uma (Radhika Apte), who’s just had an arranged marriage with an ostensible stranger. Uma spends her first days in the big city with her shy and bewildered husband Gopal (Ashok Pathak) in a claustrophobic shack with paper-thin walls. Their relationship is awkward, abrasive and lacking intimacy. Uma – quirky, fiery, vulgar – struggles to settle into a domestic routine, and even takes a job as a night cleaner out of sheer boredom and frustration.
“There is no manual for life, even though society wants us to pretend there is,” Kandhari says. “There is no manual to be an adult, a man, a woman, a partner, a wife, a husband, any of this. The story sort of spun out of a question: what happens the very next morning in a traditional marriage setup like this, in that very first moment a woman wakes up in an entirely new role, in an entirely new home, and the husband has left for work? What happens if she has no domestic bone in her body?”
When I meet the British-Indian director on Zoom, he wears a black turtle neck and large glasses, his face framed by a thick mop of 70s-style shaggy hair. “I never make anything that has one direct message. I’m open to anyone interpreting it how they want,” he says. “In a lot of ways, this film is about loneliness, whether it’s what Uma is going through, or all the other misfits she encounters in the nocturnal world of the city. She’s like a vial of unstable plutonium. Hopefully, by the end of the film, she’s a little more refined.”
As Uma’s psyche crumbles, she begins to develop certain animalistic urges. It starts with an inability to keep her food down and a sensitivity to sunlight, and ends with a thirst for blood. She hunts birds and goats, and disposes of their bodies in a drawer at home, before eventually moving on to somewhat larger prey.
Is all of this a metaphor for something? “It’s a meditation on inexperience, on being inherently strange and not really knowing how to handle it or be at peace with it,” says Kandhari. He likens it to being an artist and suffering from depression – something he has first-hand experience of. “Both these things can feed into each other, and they are both a blessing and a curse. Somebody once asked Leonard Cohen if he needed darkness to make his work. He said no, that’s a very cliched way to look at it, because the work is essentially a victory over the suffering.”
Kandhari, who was born in Kuwait and lives predominantly in London, says he’s always had an affinity with outsiders. “I’ve felt like one most of my life,” he says. “I moved around a lot, so I’m kind of from everywhere and nowhere. I naturally gravitate towards those characters. Uma is a misfit who becomes an accidental outlaw.”
Kandhari says it was “amazing” to collaborate with Apte on bringing the character to life. “She had to de-intellectualise and root everything into the body. After a couple of days, she totally slipped into this way of working. She was just so committed and happy to go to the silliest places. I’m so proud of her performance.”
Such playfulness throughout the film makes it hard to know where exactly to place it. It swerves from genre to genre, from slapstick comedy to zombie horror, gore, and even stop-motion animation. It has a distinctive visual style, with a framing and choreography that’s reminiscent of Wes Anderson movies. Was he an inspiration?
“That keeps popping up, and it’s not a thing for me,” he says. “I think Anderson and I are probably ripping off the same influences, like Satyajit Ray and Scorsese.” Other film-makers who left an imprint include Buster Keaton and Robert Altman, who, Kandhari says, “was like a total rebel with the form of cinema – he would take all these genres that you knew and then dismantle them”. The consistent thread throughout all of Kandhari’s work is humour, he says, because “humour, to me, is the poetry of storytelling, it’s magic”.
Another huge influence was music, and the film is soundtracked with a confluence of genres – from Bengali folk to American punk and blues. In place of what would be traditional Indian music, we get a cowboy ballad in a monastery of nuns; Motörhead plays as Uma races through a quintessential slum. These elements should not go together but they do. “There’s something magical that happens when you juxtapose this stuff,” says the director, who has previously made videos for bands including the Vaccines and Franz Ferdinand.
“I’m not a musician, but music was my first love and is still the thing that feeds me more than anything. There are scenes in this film that come directly from lyrics. The whole second half of the film, when Uma and Gopal come together before being separated again, is inspired by the line in Joy Division’s Shadowplay: ‘To the centre of the city in the night, waiting for you.’ There’s also a scene that comes from a line in Bob Dylan’s Drifter’s Escape, about lightning striking a courthouse.”
And what of Mumbai, a city that just like Uma, runs on its own rhythm? “I went there around 20 years ago, when I was quite young, and was taken aback by this strange city with such a big personality,” Kandhari says. “That’s when Uma just appeared, and I couldn’t get her out of my head.”
He adds: “There are great city films, like American Gigolo in LA or Taxi Driver in New York. In that sort of tradition, I hope we’ve captured Mumbai as its own character. It’s a city of contradictions. It’s the most populated place on earth in the day, but after midnight it’s an absolute ghost town. That really did inform how we showed night and day in the film. The contrast between Uma working the night shifts and walking these absolutely desolate streets which in the day are a complete circus.”
So, really, he’s been thinking about Sister Midnight for two decades? “And it took 10 years to get the film made, which is nuts,” he says.
“I guess if you’re trying to do something that’s a little different, that doesn’t spoon-feed an audience, it’ll scare off lots of financiers, which it did. I was very lucky that Film4 and the BFI were crazy enough to take a gamble. I guess there’s a lack of danger in some of the stuff that comes out in the mainstream these days. I’m all for strange, because art has to surprise you. You don’t want to constantly see what you’ve seen before. I just hope it doesn’t take another 10 years to make the next one.”
Sister Midnight is in cinemas from 14 March
