Anticipation.
Went in blind.
Enjoyment.
Deadpan drollery.
In Retrospect.
Like its heroine, this flouts all convention.
“What do normal people do on a Sunday?”, asks Uma (Radhika Apte), some way into writer/director Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight. “We’re not normal people,” her husband Gopal (Ashok Pathak) replies. Gopal is not wrong. For even though the film opens with the couple travelling by train from that most conventional of Indian practices, an arranged marriage, once they reach Gopal’s shack, he passes out, even though Uma understands, and is willing to perform, her conjugal duties.
Uma is clueless, though, on how to prepare food or keep house while Gopal is at work, and although the film starts as a silent deadpan comedy with no dialogue at all, once Uma has opened her mouth, she turns out to be disarmingly direct and crude. With Gopal typically returning home late and drunk, and the marriage remaining unconsummated, bored Uma turns to her neighbour Sheetal (Chhaya Kadam) for company and basic cooking lessons, and eventually takes a job as a cleaner in a travel agent’s miles away, where she sometimes works nights. The newlyweds barely see one another, setting the other neighbours gossiping.
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Eventually, and gradually, Uma’s otherness will express itself through elements of genre that will turn those same neighbours into a torch-bearing mob straight out of a classic Universal horror film. There are other movie references. At one point a monochrome jidaigeki showing on an old teahouse television (and parodying The Seven Samurai) takes over the screen, with its outcast rōnin a clear counterpart to Uma (who will soon imitate his topknot). And as Uma staggers exhausted down a lonely road, a theme from Paris Texas plays. Yet it is mostly with horror that Sister Midnight hilariously flirts, introducing, without ever fully pursuing or even explaining, aspects of the vampire, witch and chedipe.
Meanwhile, without really trying, Uma surrounds herself with people who are as blithely marginalised as herself: Aditi (Navya Sawant) and her gang of trans sex workers, or the lift operator at the travel agent’s who shares Uma’s love of night and quiet, or the hindu priest who appears out of nowhere to assist in a cremation ceremony, or the female Buddhist monks who do not believe in God. For in Sister Midnight, it is the oddball who rules, and Uma, surrounded by fluttering (zombie) birds – not to mention bleating goats – is like a weirdo Disney princess, and queen of the misfits.
Playing like a Jarmusch – or Amirpour – joint, Sister Midnight is a droll, strange, cool freak of a film, never quite finishing its own sentences or following through on narrative expectation. Like the pointless, frustrating 13-hour weekend excursion that Uma and Gopal take to the beach only to have no time before they need to catch the last bus back, this film is a round trip going nowhere, ending, as it begins, on a train under a full moon. Yet the journey is the thing, and its heroine is now a different person, having undergone a transformation from a man’s bride into someone more independent and formidable – indeed better than a normal person.
