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The Wire
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Wire
‘Sister Midnight' Is a Feel-Bad Fable That Liberates Radhika Apte From Bollywood
A still from Sister Midnight. Screengrab from video. Real journalism holds power accountable Since 2015, The Wire has done just that. But we can continue only with your support. Contribute Now Even though it is widely known, I don't think enough gets written about how much of a nightmare it is to watch a film in its 'purest' form in India. One can overlook the overzealous censors that infantilise the audience with humongous smoking warnings, even for films rated 'A', desecrating the work of any self-respecting filmmaker. Along with that, most ambitious films play in sparsely-populated theatres. The screening for Karan Kandhari's Sister Midnight that I attended in Bengaluru had about a dozen audience members. I have a feeling I would've enjoyed the film more if I'd seen it in a packed theatre because it has many visual gags, and most of them are spot on. Also, muted cuss words can feel like sensory speed bumps even if one can decipher them by reading the lip movement. I wondered how the British-Indian director reacted to the alterations? But hey, at least the film released, unlike Sandhya Suri's Santosh (2024). A still from Sister Midnight. Screengrab from video. Kandhari's film, also produced in the UK, has the irreverence and an energy that no Bollywood film could muster in 2025 (or a film like this couldn't get funding in India right now). Intent on feel-good fables on newly married couples, where the demure bride discovers her agency in the finale (like say, Laapataa Ladies or Mrs), Kandhari's film could be labelled a feel-bad fable. Offering Radhika Apte the license to be at her most unhinged, especially after being repeatedly let-down by most films and directors, in one clean stroke, Kandhari liberates her from Bollywood. This might be the rare film where the 39-year-old actor's bravery is reciprocated. Uma (Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak) are a newly-married couple navigating the initial awkwardness of an arranged marriage. The first time we see them, she's concerned about living in a city like Mumbai, while he's asleep. They're dumped in a one-room chawl in one of those back alleys in Bandra/Khar – ones that bustle with hawkers, autorickshaws in the mornings, and become dead silent at night. Gopal isn't the most expressive – on his first day after their marriage, he leaves for work without saying a word. To make matters worse, he comes back home drunk at night, not bothered about how Uma spent the day in this fully alien environment. A still from Sister Midnight. Screengrab from video. But it's not just him who is socially not equipped to play the part of 'husband'. If anything, Uma looks even more troubled by this life sentence of domesticity. She can't fathom her responsibility as a wife. Torn between understanding her 'duty' of providing the carnal pleasures of marriage, and fully aware of how completely ill-prepared she is to play the role of a homemaker, Uma suffocates, and then takes defiant strides to find her happiness. The first hour of Kandhari's film is a sensational study of arranged marriages and their deeply patriarchal nature, as much as about a life in an unforgiving metropolis like Mumbai. Gopal and Uma's chawl never feels like a set; one can almost smell the damp air, feel the heat trapped from the asbestos roofing and taste the humidity. What I found strained to believe in the film is how it shows Uma walking up and down from Khar to Fort everyday, for a job she takes up in a shipping company as a late-night janitor. Chhaya Kadam – India's resident character actor to showcase a middle-aged woman doling out advice to wet-around-their-ears women – plays Sheetal, the neighbour on the other side of a thin ply that separates her home from Uma and Gopal's. Kadam's wry, matter-of-fact delivery deepens the enigma of Uma's sense of displacement in Mumbai. Smita Tambe, playing Uma's nosy neighbour Reshma, is a delight. She's at the receiving end of Uma's best, most crude line, which is unfortunately muted in the version playing in Indian theatres. A still from Sister Midnight. Screengrab from video. I also liked the dynamic Apte and Pathak share on-screen. Uma's profane mouth and utter disregard for household work is balanced by Gopal's quiet fragility. His ignorance is not entirely intentional, some of it is also social awkwardness. He never asks her where she's coming from, holding a bucket and a mop, even though she can't clean their house. He eats out of polythene bags of rice and dal, too polite to confront Uma about why she hasn't cooked him a meal. Even though Uma is the author-backed role in the film, Pathak makes Gopal this luminous being, aware of his less-than-impressive face, so he tries to compensate with his soft, passive presence – never going on to become an obstacle in the path of his abrasive wife. As Uma, Apte delivers a physical performance for the ages. Saying the darndest of things, while shedding every last inch of vanity (from scratching her bum to projectile vomiting multiple times) – she never tries to lessen the blow of Uma as an anti-heroine. The best compliment I can think of paying Apte and Kandhari is how they never try to mine sympathy for Uma, and yet they also never let her become sub-human (even when the film dives deep into the pit of genre). It's in the second hour, and the longer Kandhari commits to the absurdity of his chosen genre, that the film begins to seem clueless about where it's headed. The whimsicality of the first hour – especially Paul Banks' score that features classical rock, grunge, blues, wonderfully at odds with bustling Mumbai compositions and its arid outskirts – becomes less novel towards the end. Especially, once we realise Kandhari hasn't quite figured out a way to make it land. The reflective commentary around Uma-Gopal's dysfunctional marriage – and how some people are simply not cut-out for 'conjugal bliss' – doesn't reach the heights I imagined; the messaging instead becomes garbled. Apte still swings for the fences till the last scene, but the film (with some dodgy VFX) starts to look less than what was initially promised. As it concludes, it's impossible to not admire the storm that is Karan Kandhari's Sister Midnight – even if it leaves behind a whole lot of wreckage in its wake. Such beautiful wreckage. *Sister Midnight is playing in theatres The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
The Hindu
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
‘Sister Midnight' movie review: Radhika Apte elevates this punk black comedy
At first glance, Sister Midnight, Karan Kandhari's morbidly funny debut feature, looks like a static portrait of marital inertia. There's a new bride pouting in a Mumbai chawl, slumped under the weight of expectations and boredom. The frequently immobile camera watches as Radhika Apte's Uma shuffles around her one-room box of a home, staring into the infinity of its walls. For a while, that's about it. Just a slow-motion descent into the slow cooker of domestic life that's almost aggressively mundane. But the trick of Sister Midnight is that this banality is the bait, and soon enough the hook reveals itself. Beneath the macabre sitcom setup and the Wes Anderson-like symmetry, there's something far stranger going on. Uma chances upon a goat, dead birds begin to accumulate, but at least her fever has subsided. Having begun the film as a grumpy wife, Uma starts to mutate into something else entirely. Kandhari, who is Indian by origin but London-based, channels a particularly diasporic vision of Mumbai that's intimate, but also quite surreal. The film's chawl setting is crammed with gossiping aunties and open windows and often feels claustrophobic, but also buzzes with a foreboding menace. Cinematographer Sverre Sordal lights these back alleys like dream sequences. Drab fluorescent interiors clash with sinister noirish shadows, and everything looks just slightly off. Much of the movie rests on Apte's shoulders, and she carries it like a woman hauling centuries of baggage. Uma sulks, spits, stomps, slouches, and seethes. Her barbs feel militant, and even her silences throb with insult. There's barely any exposition, but Apte and Kandhari give us all we need from a single glance on her hostage-sequence-like wedding night, to her soft-spoken husband's polite refusals for any semblance of intimacy. Sister Midnight (Hindi) Director: Karan Kandhari Cast: Radhika Apte, Ashok Pathak, Chhaya Kadam, Smita Tambe, Subhash Chandra Runtime: 110 minutes Storyline: In Mumbai, an arranged marriage spirals into darkness as the spineless husband watches his wife morph into a ruthless, feral force The genre gradually slides out from under the bed. The first half is kitchen sink absurdism, while the second has a fable-like feel to it. Kandhari doesn't make the transition seamless, but he makes it feel earned. The bratty interloper in Uma soon grows into something more mythic. Her transformation into a symbolic stand-in for Kali is teased through colour, gesture, and ritual. Her face even glows blue at just the right moment, and one character even remarks she's 'looking a bit more kali today,' with just the right weight that pun deserves. The film is peppered with delightful digressions like a Kurosawa parody playing on a teahouse television, a band of helpful trans women offering some chai and a shoulder, and a sombre lift operator who seems to be Uma's only emotional peer. Kandhari never quite ties these threads into a cohesive tapestry, but that's part of the point. His world is stitched together from the freakish leftovers of society. Kandhari's flirtations with vampire mythology are quite provocative and fun to witness. With its jarring edits, brash needle-drops, and near-expressionist lighting, the film channels a feral, Jaramuschian brand of punk, using the undead as metaphors for the unkillable rage of a woman who's had enough. However, Sister Midnight does sometimes lose control of its tone. The slapstick rhythms of its jump cuts, whip pans and sound gags begin to feel mechanised by the one-hour mark, and its tight visual language also becomes something of a constraint, as though the story is trying to scream through a very tiny symmetrical window. Sister Midnight is not a tidy film, and often lacks consistency. But it's thrillingly alive, especially in how it weaponises discomfort and turns the Yellow Wallpaper-trope of the neglected housewife into something folkloric. Kandhari's instincts occasionally betray him when he throws in a few too many motifs without always knowing where they land, but he's unmistakably a filmmaker with a vision, and a wicked sense of humour. Sister Midnight is currently running in theatres
Los Angeles Times
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In ‘Sister Midnight,' an unhappy housewife escapes into a city's rhythms
A gritty, rock-inflected comedy using the nocturnal peculiarities of Mumbai slum life as a fertile (if at times fetid) palette, British-raised Karan Kandhari's 'Sister Midnight,' about a restless young housewife's urban malaise, easily holds your attention for long stretches when seemingly little happens, but everything feels charged. Don't mistake this stylish feature debut for a misery wallow, however, or some poetic character study. It's tantalizingly oddball and indelicate: a combined daymare and night odyssey that scratches until a feral hidden strength is revealed in the misfit main character, captivatingly played by Indian star Radhika Apte. Though the movie ultimately can't square its episodic unpredictability with the bubbling feminist-outlaw energy at its core — not to mention the comic-book twist that shakes it all up halfway through — that's less a bug than a feature. Like a movie DJ, Kandhari is flexing a pulpy mood of big-city dislocation, building a trippy, jarring and blackly funny experience out of a city's stray colors, sounds and personalities. Arriving at their one-room hovel in the dead of night, arranged-marriage newlyweds and rural transplants Uma (Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak) look more like thrown-together prison cellmates adjusting to a warden's rules than a romantic couple embracing a future together. We glean that this was a match of undesirables: the timid, sexless guy no girl wanted and the girl too outspoken to be paired. But here they are, having to make do. Gopal at least has a job to go to, from which he often comes home hammered after drinks with colleagues. Uma, left behind in the solitude of a shack that only allows one shaft of window light, is quick to profanely protest the joyless, intimacy-challenged rut they've entered. Alternating between angry and exhausted, she bristles at acclimating to the domesticity that her prickly neighbor wives treat like a club handshake. Before long, Uma's taste for cigarettes under the moonlight turns into regular solo walks at all hours. An impulsive journey to a coastal part of town hours away leads to her taking a cleaning job in an office building (and a friendship with a glumly simpatico elevator operator). Suddenly, she's brandishing a mop and pail everywhere like a rootless knight without a quest or a horse. Then there's a cryptic street encounter with a goat and things get even weirder. But also, somehow, more validating. Kandhari, with his hypnotic Wes Anderson-by-way-of-David Lynch widescreen framing and deliberate tracking shots, seems more concerned with capturing something liminal in Uma's alternative existence, as if the city were just weird and oppressive enough to tease out any transformation that was already lying dormant. (By the time the movie introduces stop-motion creatures roaming the streets, you've been primed to think, 'Sure, why not?') A mischievously off-the-wall exercise like 'Sister Midnight' (which eventually embraces some gnarlier elements) needs a certain steam to keep up its deadpan wildness. Kandhari is blessed in that regard with an active visual curiosity about his cracked fable's punk potential, helped by Sverre Sørdal's humid cinematography and a game lead in Apte, whose middle-finger energy is sometimes hilariously offset by a wonderful silent-film-star haplessness. One wishes it all held together a little more, instead of laying seeds that tend to sprout vibes and distractions instead of an illuminating cohesiveness. Kandhari will too often keep Uma in cartoon rebel-goddess mode, needle-dropping another classic rock cut as if daring us to accept Motorhead or Buddy Holly as the only viable soundtrack for what's going on. But those elements are a kick, too. Of course, the title 'Sister Midnight' is an Iggy Pop staple. 'What can I do about my dreams?' it growls, an apt lyric for the singularly inventive and unmanageable fever of a movie that shares its name.
Boston Globe
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
‘Sister Midnight' finds a very gory solution to the tedium of young married life
In the opening scenes we see the vibrancy and chaos of the city, but Uma (played by Bollywood star Radhika Apte) is isolated from all of it, stuck in a one-room shack waiting to serve her new, buffoonish husband. Advertisement Nearly undone by tedium, Uma begins to rebel in small ways, including getting a job as a cleaning woman at a travel agency in the wealthy part of the city, a world away. Along the way, she begins to change, and while she is initially horrified by her new desires, she eventually accepts herself. The only people she connects with at all are other outsiders — trans sex workers or female Buddhist monks who do not believe in God. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Director Karan Kandhari. Magnet Releasing Several other factors heighten the film's disorienting shift from real to surreal. Kandhari, who is British Indian and was born in Kuwait, began visiting Mumbai when he was young and became 'intoxicated' by the city. 'I visited it many times, like it was a weird addiction,' he says. 'It's a really strange place and I mean that as a compliment. I was always just trying to get my head around the place.' Advertisement But the Mumbai of the movie is neither the one he first visited — 'it's not a period piece' — nor is it exactly contemporary. 'I got stuck in the geography in my head,' he explains, saying he chose to replicate parts of the city that lived in his memory, which have long since vanished in actuality. 'I draw floor plans for things that don't exist and we have to adjust places to fit. So it's a weird mishmash of fragments of things I remember from the '80s or the '90s, or things I've seen from the '70s.' While 'Sister Midnight' has prompted comparisons to Wes Anderson films, Kandhari dismisses the connection, saying the rich colors and the unusual supporting characters are organic to Mumbai. 'We are probably influenced by the same people, but he's creating an artificial world of weirdness, whereas I see the world as inherently weird and strange and I'm trying to find that in the mundane.' Additionally, Uma's experiences are not just set to local music — the soundtrack features songs by Howlin' Wolf, Buddy Holly, The Band, The Stooges, and Motorhead. (Kandhari lives and breathes music and has directed videos for artists including Franz Ferdinand.) Yet the film is also, in an odd way, autobiographical, even though Kandhari's life is nothing like Uma's. He suffers from depression and says the film ponders what it's like to feel different and out of place without knowing how to handle it. Advertisement 'I have the sort of brain that questions things like societal norms if they don't make sense,' he says, so while the film is about this arranged marriage it's really about being trapped by societal expectations. 'We should always question the rules — just because something is old doesn't mean it's right.' Those themes, along with the wildly imaginative script, are what appealed to Apte, who holds together every scene no matter how strange it gets — and it gets quite strange, once some of the creatures she has devoured (birds and goats) come back to life in animated form and are fruitful and multiply. 'I've never read a script like this before. What happens is quite crazy and unexpected,' she says. 'I didn't always know what to think, but it was quite relatable, and I really liked how compassionate Karan was to all his characters.' Apte was fascinated by the fate that befalls Uma when 'All she does is ask 'Why' about the daily way of life that we blindly follow.' That trait resonated with Apte, who went to a progressive school in India when they were new and became 'a proper pain in the ass' because she was taught to question everything. 'If somebody says something that doesn't make sense, I'll ask, 'Can you explain why?' That's not me being arrogant. That's just me genuinely trying to understand.' Still, Apte found the role challenging at first. She studied math in school, so she 'needs logic for everything,' and she loves developing a character's biography to understand why they react to certain things. 'But I knew very little about Uma, whose past was summed up in five lines.' Advertisement Kandhari knew he was asking her to go against her instincts. 'She's a cerebral, intellectual person and analyzes a lot,' Kandhari says. 'My task when we started rehearsals was to get her to de-intellectualize everything, get her rooted in the present moment and impulsively performing with her body. She was a little scared in the first couple of days before it clicked.' So while Apte would normally figure out what her character was doing before taking action and why she'd take that action, she says the director would tell her, 'I want Uma to get up before you can think of why she gets up.' 'I really struggled at first, but then I stopped asking questions and it felt really right,' she says, adding that the role helped her grow as a person too. (Having a baby also furthered that change, she says. 'I've definitely stopped asking why she cries — she's crying, so I must do something.') 'I've become more likely to make a decision and then move on with it,' she says. 'I've started learning to relinquish control in life.' Apte is curious to see what American audiences make of the film, but says that it has resonated with audiences elsewhere. 'People have found it very relatable, which was quite cool, because when I read it for the first time, no matter how crazy the story felt, it also was very relatable.'
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Kandhari Global Beverages deal for Hindustan Coca-Cola assets gets green light
India's competition watchdog has waved through Kandhari Global Beverages' acquisition of a set of assets from Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages. In a brief statement issued yesterday (22 April), the Competition Commission of India said it had approved the deal between the two Coca-Cola bottlers, which had been drawn up earlier this year. Kandhari Global Beverages supplies and distributes products for The Coca-Cola Company in the Indian state of Rajasthan. The group is buying Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages' (HCCB) assets northern Gujarat and Diu. Kandhari Global Beverages has factories in states including Haryana, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh. Last month, Varinder Pal Singh Kandhari, the managing director of Kandhari Global Beverages, reportedly indicated the company's ambitions to expand outside India. 'We do look forward to being global someday, i.e., beyond the boundaries of India, if there's an opportunity that ever comes up from the Coca-Cola Company,' Kandhari was quoted as saying by business outlet Mint. 'As of now, whatever they had to re-franchise they have. But there could be other opportunities coming up.' In December, The Coca-Cola Co. agreed to sell a 40% stake in Hindustan Coca-Cola Holdings, the owner of HCCB, to Jubilant Bhartia Group. With 14 factories across ten Indian states, HCCB manufactures and sells 37 products across eight brands, including soft drinks such as Coca-Cola, Thums Up and Sprite. December also saw HCCB offloaded its bottling operations in the Indian state of Jharkhand to Moon Beverages. At the start of last year, the group sold three bottling operations to SLMG Beverages, Moon Beverages and Kandhari Global Beverages. The latter snapped up assets in Rajasthan. "Kandhari Global Beverages deal for Hindustan Coca-Cola assets gets green light" was originally created and published by Just Drinks, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site. Sign in to access your portfolio
