True, there is nothing entirely new under the sun. Karan Kandhari’s repeated flat compositions – actor facing the camera as if to a fourth wall – cannot, though derived from Buster Keaton, fail to remind the viewer of Wes Anderson. There is something of that director’s adjacency to the antic surreal here also.
But the British-Indian film-maker’s feature debut, a hit at Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, nonetheless remains endlessly refreshing. So joyous and inventive is each scene that it proves easy to disregard the ambling lack of plot. The actors grasp the singular aesthetic with glee. It has the best goats of the season.
Radhika Apte plays Uma, an irrepressible oddball who, newly married to Gopal (Ashok Pathak), a virtual stranger, fails triumphantly to perform any of the duties expected of her. Cooking is a drag. Sex doesn’t seem to offer any relief. The surrounding Mumbai chaos allows no space for contemplation.
As is the case everywhere else on the planet, female acquaintances roll eyes at the shallowness of husbands’ expectations and ambitions. “Men are dumb,” one says. “Put in enough chilli and salt and they’ll eat anything.” That’s mean. That’s reductive. But I can’t say I’m not seen.
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The film moves towards madness as a live body hurtles to earth: at first gradually, then very quickly indeed. The couple argue over small things. She raises eyebrows at frequent queries about her skin-whitening techniques. By the last act she is chewing live animals and placing the mummified remains in a drawer – from whence, like characters in a Jan Švankmajer animation, they later emerge jerkily back to life.
This is a perfectly pitched comic performance from Apte, but she also gets at the desperation that drives Uma to the edge of sanity (and maybe beyond). There is little explicit complaint about the role of women in Indian society, but the film’s deranged ambience reflects all those unspoken rages.
Much credit must go to the gleaming, urgent cinematography by Sverre Sordal. Rock classics such as Mambo Sun by T Rex, and Motörhead by (bless them) Motörhead, further add to the sense of energies dangerously unleashed.
It feels like faint praise to say there is enormous promise here – Sister Moonlight is, after all, a complete work – but one can scarcely imagine where Kandhari will go next.
In cinemas from Friday, March 14th
