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Bursting the class bubble

In 2013, Cannes Critics’ Week, a section that runs parallel to the world’s premiere film festival, was the platform from where Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox launched itself into the world.

Bursting the class bubble

Tillotama Shome in a still from the film



Saibal Chatterjee

In 2013, Cannes Critics’ Week, a section that runs parallel to the world’s premiere film festival, was the platform from where Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox launched itself into the world. The Irrfan Khan-Nimrat Kaur-Nawazuddin Siddiqui-starrer went on to spread its aroma to every corner of the globe.

Five years on, another genteel, delectably crafted Indian independent film — first-time fiction director Rohena Gera’s Sir — premiered in the Critics’ Week and received an enthusiastic audience response — reason enough to believe that it has the makings of another international hit. A Cannes award has only strengthened that expectation.

Like The Lunchbox, Sir is set in Mumbai and its narrative hinges on human connections across social and emotional divide — and food. But Gera’s film, which has leading French sales agent mk2 representing it in the international market, is of a distinct timbre, which is enhanced by the controlled performances of the two lead actors, Tillotama Shome (Qissa) and Vivek Gomber (Court).

Shome plays Ratna, a Maharashtrian village woman, who works as a live-in housemaid for a real-estate family scion, Ashwin (Gomber).The latter, coming off a broken relationship, is in an emotionally vulnerable state. The maid, widowed at age 19, is a strong-willed woman not content with her lot in life. She seeks to hone her tailoring skills with an eye on a career in fashion designing.

There is little in common between the two individuals as they go about their respective lives, but a quiet bond develops between them as Ratna rustles up meals for the man and runs the home with unwavering efficiency. The element of social transgression in the relationship bothers Ratna more than it does Ashwin. The screenplay approaches a difficult narrative terrain with subtlety and acute awareness of the intractable issues at play.

The character of Ratna is of the kind  we rarely see in our cinema. “We do not see them in our films because we choose not to see them in our lives. The people who work in our homes are invisible,” says Gera, who, in 2013, made the documentary What’s Love Got to Do With It?, which explored the phenomenon of arranged marriages even among well-travelled, well-heeled Indians.

Sir is an Indo-French co-production. It won the Critics’ Week’s Gan Foundation Award for Distribution and is slated for release in France by the end of the year. It isn’t just international distribution that Gera is focusing on. “We have retained the domestic distribution rights because we understand the Indian market better,” says the writer-director, who has produced the film with her French husband Brice Poisson and Cine Sud’s Thierry Lenouvel.

“I would like a strong distribution for Sir in India and not the sort of release that goes unnoticed,” she says, asserting that the film was never meant to be an arthouse project. “It is a simple, feel-good film,” she adds. “So we were a bit surprised when it got picked for the Critics’ Week.”

Gera reveals that she workshopped with the actors for a long time in order to ease them into their roles. “Tillotama is an intense actor, so I had to get her to be lighter and bring in a sense of joy into the character,” she says. “I was mindful that these people do not always see themselves as victims. They cling to hope and dignity,” adds Gera.

Shome’s interpretation of Ratna is the fulcrum of Sir, with Gomber, an embodiment of restraint, providing the ideal foil as a man who holds the aces in the master-servant dynamic but refrains from exercising his privilege and ascendancy. “Ashwin is trapped in a gilded cage. He belies the belief that affluence equals happiness,” explains Gera. 

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