You can build a house, but you never learned to carry an umbrella in the rain.
The song flows out of Thooya (pronounced Thua) every time she marinates her fish, stirs her pan or scrubs the bathroom floor. In a few days, it becomes a sort of anthem for her and her new roommate, Shweta, and something that thaws the awkwardness of strangers coming to live together.
Bengali filmmaker Anuparna Roy, who wrote the story of Thooya and Shweta in the days she toiled at a call centre job, found its seeds in her grandmother’s life. “She got married when she was nine and the moment she stepped inside her marital house, she found a widow there, of her same age. Societal relations or norms of the time made the widow her step daughter. The two of them developed a friendship inside that house. After my grandfather died, the two women raised the whole family by themselves. The story gave me the motivation of developing something with two women,” says Anuparna. TNM met her a few hours after the film – Songs of forgotten trees – was screened at the International Film Festival of Kerala on December 13.
The film is crisp (only 78 minutes), sensitive and organic as it looks at the growing relationship between two women who are sharing an apartment in Mumbai. Its beauty lies in being poetic without trying to be, casual and unpretentious and gently pulling you into the lives of the two women.
Songs of forgotten trees and Anuparna drew a lot of attention when she won an award at the Venice International Film Festival in September. Anuparna, in her reception speech, expressed in a quivering but strong voice, her solidarity with Palestine. She famously ‘took a moment’ to say: “Every child deserves peace, freedom and liberation and Palestine is no exception. I don’t want any clap for this. It is a responsibility to think for a moment to stand beside Palestine.”
Unsurprisingly the public support of the Palestine cause brought her a lot of angry reaction, and even now, three months after the incident, she is getting hate messages and threats, she says.
“But I had spoken for Palestine last year, when I got to screen my short film Run to the River at a film festival in Russia; no one had picked it up then,” she says.
The Venice festival is bigger, and friends, including filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, who presented her movie, advised her not to speak of Palestine.
“But I was very sure of it, that if I get a mic to speak I will only talk about the miseries around me. I will not sing a song. If I get a stage I will definitely be responsible and talk about something vicious. When a genocide is happening, I will talk against it. I can't be blind,” Anuparna says, with the assurance of youth.
She is only 27 (“someone has put it as 31 on my Wikipedia page, and no, Ritwik Ghatak has not named me”). But she did grow up watching Ghatak’s films and the works of other great auteurs like Satyajit Ray. When she grew older she began to watch world cinema.
That is her learning, she says, not a formal education or working on the sets. “Although I did have stints as assistant director on various occasions, doing all the running around,” she adds.
As she began working on her film, she began to revise her original script over and over again. The two main characters were to have detailed backstories. But at one point she felt she was explaining too much and deleted a lot of scenes she had shot.
Of the two, Thooya (Naaz Shaikh) is more open, expressive while Shweta (Sumi Baghel) comes across as a private person, indifferent to what her roommate was up to. No words are exchanged between the two new acquaintances until small gestures lead to conversations and songs and sharing of life stories. Anuparna realised she did not want to make any obvious or loud gestures to define their relationship. She steps back and leaves it to the audience to guess from their stolen glances and pained expressions what one may come to mean to the other.
“Female friendships in movies have either been too little explored or else too much on the face, with all that drama. That is something I wanted to avoid. I wanted the hesitation in my characters, I made sure they would not touch each other and when they did, it should have that impact. It was my first film and I was growing with my film,” Anuparna says.
A scene with both of them scrubbing the floors across a wall, and one crossing over to the other at a particularly sensitive moment, made quite an impact that Anuparna could not say ‘cut’ until her actors asked her to. There is also a park scene she keeps revisiting with Shweta sharing the silence of two elderly men who always sit there on a bench and don’t say a word. Cutting out her explanations and detailing must be one of the best decisions Anuparna made because these scenes are beautiful, without attempting to be arty or intellectual. Just small vignettes you’d like to take home with you, if you could.