It’s tempting to read an agenda into Sister Midnight, the raucous genre-bending debut feature from writer-director Karan Kandhari. From the patriarchy to provincialism, society’s conventions seek to entrap the film’s misfit protagonist, Uma, at every turn, setting her up as a potential feminist heroine. But Kandhari, whose film premiered in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, is not interested in soapboxes. He’s barely interested in dialogue.
“One of the first things [Radhika Apte, who plays Uma] said to me was, ‘I don’t see this as a film [where] we’re trying to beat a message over anyone’s head.’ And I was like, ‘Absolutely, that’s not even how I think,’” Kandhari says of the Mumbai-set Sister, which follows Uma as she transforms from an ornery young bride in an arranged marriage into a thoroughly unconventional antihero. Protagonist Pictures is handling world sales on the film at AFM.
What Kandhari does think about, however, is human intuition and behavior. So when the headstrong Uma, bored to death and suffocating in a tiny flat with her hapless husband, begins to feel mysterious impulses, she follows them — to unexpected ends.
“All art comes from the unconscious and it’s not a place where words should be. Thinking is for the editing phase,” says Kandhari, a big fan of silent cinema, especially Buster Keaton. “[Finding Uma’s motivation] was really about [Radhika and I] finding the truth in the character by eliminating the words and letting her find her instinct by constantly rooting the performance, being very aware of the present moment and the body.”
The epicenter of the story, Uma’s body seems to rebel against her stifling domestic bubble. She becomes physically ill, unable to eat even rice and lentils. A run-of-the-mill stomach bug, a doctor tells her. But when all she does want to eat is live goats and birds, it’s clear something else is going on.
In the absence of much exposition, Apte uses her body language to communicate Uma’s journey, changing from a woman who’s “full of attitude, full of identity and personality, but [also] a strange dis-ease” to someone “content and calm and accepting, and a bit more sort of matured,” Kandhari says. “She’s basically a jar of unstable plutonium that’s hopefully slightly refined by the end.”
Kandhari and Apte worked on Uma’s backstory together, coming up with details the audience never learns and rehearsing unscripted scenes. Kandhari then broke the script down into chapters, and he and Apte worked within that structure to create a kind of shorthand.
“We developed a sort of secret language as we were doing it, like we’d have strange phrases and words that nobody else understood what was going on,” Kandhari recalls. “Because the character, she’s very fully formed in her behavior, and I’m interested in behavior specifically. So once we nailed down who she was and her behavior, within that sort of framework we knew how to tap into certain parts of her. And that’s when we built up the language between us, and we could easily, with a little phrase, know what was going on with her.”
He adds: “Once you can eliminate the words in your collaborator’s and your own mind, and if you know your intention, then you can get to the truth.”
But while there isn’t much dialogue in Sister, there is an unexpected soundtrack — of ’60s Cambodian soul tunes, tracks by Howlin’ Wolf and the Stooges, among others, and original music by Interpol’s Paul Banks — that compliments Uma’s wild ride.
“Film is an audiovisual medium. It’s related to theater, but it’s not theater. And the strength of this medium is being able to take those two elements and affect someone in a theater mostly unconsciously,” Kandhari says. “One day I hope I can get to the point where there’s zero dialogue in anything I do. That would be the goal.”
English (US) ·