‘Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman’ Review: A Lyrical Antidote to Storytelling

Director: Nidhi Saxena
Writer: Nidhi Saxena
Cast: Anamika Tiwari, Bhadra Basu

Middle-aged Nidhi (Anamika Tiwari) lives in a decrepit ancestral home with her old mother (Bhadra Basu). The home, too, lives in this decrepit mother-daughter duo; their trauma is ancestral and they are haunted — and trapped — by memories, emotions and social walls. Nidhi has spent so much of her adult life as a caregiver that care has become her illness; it’s hard to tell one wilting woman from the other. She thinks of her absent father, her complicated childhood and her mother’s incorrigible despair.

Nidhi Saxena’s Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman is, on paper, a 77-minute work of autofiction. You can tell that it’s personal, explorative and achingly close. But it exists in the cloudy void between life and storytelling; between the transience of moments and our shapeless perception of them. There is no narrative because the essence of this film is unfilmable — it strives to be an artistic manifestation of the human experience. Much of it is felt through silhouettes of sound, unspoken words and fragmented images.

The medium might be audiovisual, but the “characters” and the house denote a place and time rather than a story. What we actually see and hear of their situation is this: Nidhi scans the walls with a boom mic to record echoes, whispers and snippets of a lifetime in this house. She’s interrogating it as a witness and collecting any information she can. She also makes phone calls and writes letters to her childhood self. Their conversations are dotted with phrases like “museum of the past”, “homes are like cavities”, and “she has the key whose lock she has forgotten” (a poetic way to describe mental illness).

The film implores us to find answers in monotony; in the cracks of linearity. A woman eats fish and rice on her bed; a mound of bones forms on the floor below. An old lady falls asleep in front of a blinking television set; an apple falls from her hand and rolls across the room. Light and shadows melt into the antiquity of the furniture. A naked, broken figure sits in front of the mirror and looks at her own reflection, willing herself to disappear. A sullen woman — it’s the mother, but it’s also Nidhi in a way — eats her birthday cake alone after everyone leaves the room. The camera stays on her uncomfortably, as if it were the long master take from which shorter memories are eventually cut and printed. By extending the moment against its wishes, it also reflects the subtext of womanhood and generational pain.

Forest Flower Films/Film Council Productions/Eleenora Images

At times, you hear one film but see a different one. You hear a flashback but see a window. The style implies that stories tend to be a cultural appropriation of feelings; movies are too often a depiction of the psyche rather than an extension of the mind. The dissonance between the soundscape and the moving (and static) picture here is unsettling; not because it makes no conventional sense, but because it reverses the meaning of sense. Nidhi and her mother have morphed into loops of each other because the house that protected them from their past is now a maze of muted spots that protects their past from them. It’s a difficult portrait of not only the continuity of trauma but also our relationship with the nostalgia that nurtures and dismantles us. The oldness of the structure is so indistinguishable from that of the people within it that their inner worlds keep colliding.

Parts of Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman evoke the sensory blending of time and space in Aftersun (2022), Charlotte Wells’ semi-experimental and startling provocation on grief. At times, Nidhi seems to be simultaneously remembering, forgetting and being; different shots of the same scene emerge from disparate dimensions of her life. It’s almost like the identity of this film slowly inches towards the door of the home. The final shot — which doesn’t escape the house so much as float out of it — alters the meaning of the film’s loneliness and self-reckoning. You rethink the title, the characters’ words and actions, the phantom exchanges, and the role of the narrator in this whole thing.

Meandering in your thoughts is an integral part of this viewing experience. Towards the end, for instance, I recalled a short story I wrote in my childhood. It featured a girl held captive by a film studio because of her supernatural gift: her imagination is so strong that it can be broadcasted — and magically produced — onto a screen. So they’d feed her plots and storylines and faces so that she could imagine entire movies out of nothing. One night, she escapes her cell and, during a frantic manhunt, falls asleep on top of a satellite antenna. Over the next few hours, her dreams and nightmares get transmitted to the entire world. The abstract ‘film’ becomes an instant classic.

This is inextricably attached to the rooted magic realism of Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman. When Nidhi captures sounds from the walls and relays her future wounds to her younger self, the human is lost somewhere between the satellite and the studio. She is the fading star of her own abstract film. After all, the spirit of living often mutates into the ghost of having lived.