Quick on the heels of Nandita Das’s Manto , it was time for another Indian filmmaker, Rohena Gera, to revel in the spotlight at Cannes. Ms. Gera’s maiden directorial venture, Sir , was screened to much applause at the Critics Week sidebar on Monday.
Sir is a little wisp of a story — the changing dynamics of the relationship between a domestic live-in help, Ratna (Tillotama Shome), and her wealthy employer, Ashwin (Vivek Gomber). Ms. Gera sets up the world pretty well: the huge apartment in affluent Mumbai and within it the worlds of the owner and the staff; the distance and formality, the disparities and the boundaries.
Rhythm of life
Ms. Gera builds the edifice of the film on the banal daily rhythm of life. Nothing of any enormity really happens: Ratna cooks, cleans and manages the home for Ashwin as he tries to come to terms with having been dumped just a few days before wedding. She drinks tea on the terrace with fellow help Lakshmitai and, as the maximum city sprawls down below, she dreams of becoming a fashion designer. He, on the other hand, has given up on his ambitions of becoming a writer in the U.S. You wonder how Ms. Gera will take this forward, and if she would be able to sustain interest in the story without the necessary drama.
Sir does feel like static TV drama at times, being confined to an apartment for most of its duration. It may not appear cinematic enough. While the world of Ratna (that is, that of the servants) gets set up very well and has a lived in feel to it, the upper crust looks a trifle stilted. Also, the humble film that it is, Sir makes no bones about wearing its indie modesty on its sleeve.
But Ms. Gera manages to extract a good show from Mr. Gomber and Ms. Shome in the lead. The latter, in particular, is in fantastic form, not with her get-up — the nylon saris and the wrist watch — but also the hemmed-in body language and the slight stoop of obeisance. There is warmth and empathy in Ms. Shome’s Ratna as well as optimism, hope, fire and strength. There is the inherent subservience yet a quiet rebellion and hidden anger against the societal hierarchies.
Sir is a love story across class divides, which is not quite about romance. A sweet, heart-warming film that attempts to question the world without quite bringing it tumbling down. At the end of it, you know things haven’t changed radically and yet, you also know they very well have, irrevocably. Sir is all about silent subversion.
All in the family
The spirit of subversion underlines Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters as well. The Japanese auteur, a Cannes favourite, starts off with a seeming sense of fun as a family of thieves takes a little girl under its wings. Hurt and abused in her violent original home, she takes to the affection from her new parents and siblings. Here, father and son steal from shops, the mom from her office, daughter does some soft porn peep shows and the grandmom is into slot machines. The film starts off as fun but gets progressively poignant and unravels into something dark and edgy as it nears the end.
At a time when one has been reading countless articles on urban loneliness gnawing Japan, Mr. Kore-eda rips into the traditional family structure. It’s the “normal” families where the rot has set in. Redemption seems to lie in the informal cobbling together of individuals into family-like units.
Shoplifters raises the same question that had come up earlier in Everybody Knows , Asghar Farhadi’s opening film — can an adopted family be any less than the real one? The answer, however, can’t be a simple yes. Is the innocence of a surrogate family as pure as it seems? When will the pack of cards that have built it come falling down? Shoplifters is genteel yet devastating.
