An Uneasy Shape of Home

SHIVANI KHATI

Movie Review

  Watching ‘Shape of Momo’ felt like discovering a forgotten piece of clothing from your teenage years, stowed away in the back of your cupboard. That strange mix of disappointment and relief upon acceptance that growing out of things is not always a loss. The film grapples with the messiness of adulthood foregrounded by the tussle between wanting to conform to societal standards of success, while simultaneously resisting it with equal conviction. It masterfully explores this conflict through the intersecting pressures of gender and class unfolding like an incisive narrative of becoming, in the life of a woman in her early thirties. 

    Even before the film begins, its poster shows an overhead shot of the protagonist curled up on a rock by the riverside, shaped like a momo. This delightful weaving of visual metaphor by collapsing landscape, culturally symbolic food, and body into one sets the tone for the film. The film’s worldbuilding is immersive, one where music is restrained to emphasise the ambient sounds of nature thus creating a sensorial intimacy with the place. We experience a story that refrains from relying on the beauty of Sikkim’s landscape to enchant the viewers. Instead, it unapologetically focuses on the complex lived realities of being a woman across three generations in a small village.

     A common cinematic trope used in coming of age films is the return-to-roots narrative style which often essentialises the opposition between an alienated urban life and slow country living. The movie has little interest in such strategic comforts and depicts homecoming as a jarring process of confusion with no guarantee of belongingness based on familiarity. Using  extreme closeup shots we are denied any emotional distance, feeling everything with the primary protagonist Bishnu (played by Gaumaya Gurung), who has left her content writing job in the city and returned to her village in the hope of starting a homestay business. Throughout the film she remains unsettled by an intricate knot of expectations thrust upon her both as an insider and an outsider. The gnawing weight of holding a household together without a male member coupled by the frustration at never measuring up to needs of the women in her family. Her angst is imminent even though she frequently slips into a performative masculine role while negotiating with the demands of patriarchal ordering. This contradiction becomes most poignant during her interactions with her sister (Shyama Shree Sherpa) whose embracing of domestic life unnerves her own sense of self.  

  The central conflict of the film unfurls during the opening scenes when the four women bicker playfully over using amiability as a survival tactic in society while basking in the winter sun. Bishnu refuses to coddle anybody while the others believe in the necessity of compromise in preserving stability and soothing the sensibilities of the samaj. Out of this friction emerges a character at once charming and unlikeable, navigating the precarious terrain of gender and class. 

   The clearest articulation of her class position becomes visible in her dealings  with the family of labourers living on her familial land and working at their orange orchard. Her mothers empathetic voice is drowned by her apathetic one as she relentlessly presses for payment from them. Unmoved by their emotional pleas she pays no heed to their revelation that their youngest child is gravely ill. It is only when she runs into the sick child at the hospital later that we see her go through guilt. A particularly riveting scene stands out where the eldest son of the tenant family declines the gift of fruits she brings to them. On her way back, the labourer’s son, long resentful of Bishnu, stands atop a hill and releases the plastic of fruits given by her watching it tumble down one by one towards her. It is a quietly devastating moment where for a moment the hierarchy is reversed. He stands in a position of power above her elevated not by class privilege but a furious refusal to subordinate his dignity.

   If the film is attentive to class it also explores the overlapping layers of gendered life within the household through the women surrounding Bishnu—mother (Pashupati Rai), sister, and grandmother (Bhanu Maya Rai). All three negotiate parallel versions of the same struggle offering an alternate script of womanhood: a mother who has stretched herself thin to adapt to her husband's world and continues to equate self-worth with feminine duty, a grandmother who seeks validation from her sons despite her daughter-in-law’s devotion towards her, and a sister burdened by the social insistence on bearing a son and the pressure to be perpetually agreeable. The camera follows Bishnu’s disconcerted gaze as she stands at the brink of making a choice that could shape her life.

     This accumulated unease spills into her romantic relationship with Gyan (Rahul Nawach Mukhia), the pleasant architect and MLA’s son adored by the women in Bishnu’s family. He represents the promise of societal respect and restoration of a missing masculine centre in the house. Even as Bishnu finds herself growing attached to him, we see her during scenes of silent reckoning fraught by the possibility of her selfhood being eclipsed. Love is an attractive bait but the cost of losing her voice is irreconcilable to her. Their ending may divide audiences but rather than offering a moral resolution the film leaves us with something gentler; the sight of an imperfect woman remaining articulate even in the face of fate. 

      The film resounds with melancholia throughout, although there are some visual motifs that stayed with me long after the credits rolled. Like, Bishnu’s solitary runs through the forest interrupted by glimpses of a woman in her neighbourhood pacing endless circles on her terrace, representing self-imposed boundaries. From Bishnu’s shoulder, the camera seems to judge her but by the end of the film, we see an inversion. As Bishnu heads out for another run to pull herself together, the camera returns to the terrace only to find it empty. The woman is shown on the street, nervous but committed to movement.  

    Overall, Tribeny Rai’s Shape of Momo felt like encountering a deeply familiar lore in an unexpected form, like drinking homemade tea poured into a new cup. The brilliance of the film lies in expressing universality within the specificity of its beautifully unresolved world. Each of the characters are handled with care, space being made for their frustrations, contradictions, as well as fleeting moments of freedom. A profound depth is embedded in the film’s recurring joke about Bishnu’s inability to shape a momo perfectly. Surrounded by women accustomed to folding themselves into acceptable forms, she is an awkward misfit, unable or perhaps unwilling to succumb to what's expected of her.

(The writer is  a PhD research scholar in Sociology. Email: shivani.khati1@gmail.com)