Most homecoming stories have a narrative pattern. Especially the feel-good ones. The central character returns to their village from the big city. But the perspective is new. Suddenly everything feels regressive. There are problems and prejudices. The locals sound smaller, and the enlightened protagonist operates from a higher moral ground. Social change is inevitable; the hero simply knows better. Either they leave as the bigger person or stay to fix it all. It’s the urban-saviour syndrome refitted into a back-to-roots template.
The setup of Tribeny Rai’s memoir-coded Shape of Momo follows this cultural pattern. The 30-something protagonist, Bishnu (Gaumaya Gurung), has taken a break from her job in Delhi to visit her village in Sikkim. She is visibly different from the rest: aware, observant, ambitious, and woke. She likes the fact that the three generations of her family at their ancestral home are women: her ailing grandmother, her hard-working mother (a terrific Pashupati Rai), and her pregnant sister (Shyama Shree Sherpa).
The film opens with Bishnu flaunting her work and reading out a lyrical ad she wrote for a newspaper, but her face falls the second the pride of the village elders turns into a discussion about finding her a husband. She’s instantly at odds with the patriarchy of her surroundings. She can’t understand why her mother cares about what others think; she scoffs at the older woman’s paranoia about migrant workers in the field. She can’t understand her sister’s decision to give up her studies to start a family. She can’t even understand her grandmother’s desire to wait for her son to take her to Dubai.
You can tell that the city has toughened her. As someone who has survived Delhi as both an outsider and a woman, Bishnu is almost obligated to sound more enlightened and aggressive. The film initially leans into this impression, too. It validates her frustration when she takes charge of her mother’s orchard and bargains with the fruit vendor. She is at loggerheads with a labourer and his chauvinism. She does not trust the locals, but having been a migrant herself, she refuses to legitimise her mom’s paranoia about the workers in the field. She even takes a while to warm up to a sweet architect (Rahul Mukhia) who likes her. In short, Bishnu behaves like a no-nonsense son who’s come home to set everyone straight. She is wary of everyone and their excuses, automatically absolving herself of empathy for the place she left in search of greener pastures.
But as Shape of Momo gears through stages of her disillusionment, it does something rare. It sheds the age-old Indian habit of demonising others to deify the protagonist. Bishnu isn’t wrong to feel the way she does, but she is slowly humbled by an environment that resists her social entitlement. The film shows compassion for a setting that most movies are wired to condescend on. The mother, sister and others in the village haven’t resigned themselves to their fate so much as subscribed to a way of living; the conditioning is so absolute that they would in fact be mistaken to change. It’s not that they’re wrong or lesser either, it’s just who they are.
In the process, it reveals Bishnu as someone who tries to ‘correct’ a culture to repair her own journey of belonging. For better or worse, her return is a bit self-serving, given her relationship with a mainstream India that has not accepted her. It’s a remarkably mature and vulnerable choice for a film that dares to interrogate its own perspective. The craft of the film supports its courage to look between the lines. The cinematography is grounded, opting for a gaze over an aesthetic and a state of mind over geographical stature. The sound design is immersive, committing to the ambience of rural Sikkim as a character trait; the landscape is very much a factor in the way we comprehend her relief. I like the way even the colour of the clothes reflect the progression — and stagnation — of the character. You think she’s breaking free until she’s breaking.
The interiority brings to mind the award-winning All We Imagine As Light by Payal Kapadia (one of the executive producers of Shape of Momo), another tender drama about the illusions of belonging for those stranded between identities. Rai’s film is a little more on the nose, though. But the nose is sensitive enough. The title refers to Bishnu’s inability to make a conventionally-shaped momo. “It’s the taste that matters,” she declares, delivering an allegory for the shapelessness of her own personality. Gaumaya Gurung plays Bishnu in a way that allows the script to not oversell the subtext. It's a turn full of silent perception and body language. As the character tries to navigate her new (but old) reality, she realises the irony of abandoning the truths of womanhood to stand out as an antidote to fitting in.
Bishnu ends up ‘performing’ a sense of masculinity at times, despite looking down on her family’s habit of securing the premises by pretending that a patriarch lives with them. Her dissent is reactionary, too, most evident in a moment where she puffs on a cigarette as soon as she hears her boyfriend say that “girls shouldn't smoke anyway”. She is determined to be the catalyst of a social-message drama until she is pummeled by the bitter learnings of a coming-of-age tragedy. There's much to admire about the manner in which Gurung’s Bishnu retreats from the linearity of the future she chooses. She can’t understand why she does not understand; she can’t long if she does not belong. It isn't framed as the panic of someone who feels stifled by the place; it's the crisis of someone who cannot accept her own suffocation. If it takes a city to diminish her agency, it takes a village — her village — to raise her hopes. In many ways, all she imagines is light. But all she doesn’t imagine is the dimness of it.