Sir
Rohena Gera (2018)
In its economical, unassertive way, Sir (on Netflix) builds to a powerful critique of Indian social hierarchy. (As such, it’s much superior to the more recent, flashier and overlong The White Tiger.) Set mostly in present-day Mumbai, writer-director Rohena Gara’s romantic drama is also a fine, involving character study – of its heroine, Ratna (Tillotama Shome), and its title character, Ashwin (Vivek Gomber). At the start of the film, Ratna leaves the village home of her mother and younger sister to return to Mumbai, where she’s employed by Ashwin’s mother (Divya Seth Shah), to keep house – sleek apartment, that is – for her son. Ratna’s return to work is sudden and unexpected. She’d been on a few days’ leave, staying with her family, while Ashwin was getting married. On what should have been his wedding day, he’s come back to his apartment after leaving his bride Sabina at the altar.
Gera loses no time starting to build a picture of the master-servant relationship and its implications. Ratna is a live-in maid, whose room is on the other side of the wall from Ashwin’s. His bedroom is spacious; hers gives new force of meaning to the term box room, especially after Sabina’s driver (Saharsh Kumar Shukla) arrives with a consignment of large, gift-wrapped packages – unopened wedding presents. These are stored – out of sight out of mind, as far as Ashwin is concerned – in Ratna’s cubby hole. In the first days after getting back, Ashwin, though restless and morose, is never rude to his factotum yet barely registers her presence as a person, as distinct from a regular supplier of meals and refreshment. We see them both in their lives outside the apartment. Ratna, who dreams of becoming a fashion designer, starts working for a local tailor two hours a day – the duration of her afternoon break from housekeeping, though she gets Ashwin’s permission before starting the other job. It doesn’t last long: she’d been hoping to learn how to make garments; the tailor (Bachan Pachera), knowing Ratna’s a servant, gives her only menial jobs – clearing up, running errands – to do. She subsequently enrols on a sewing course instead. Ashwin is an architect, working for the family firm. A couple of short scenes on a building site give us a sense of tensions between him and his father (Rahul Vohra), the company boss.
From early on too, Gera supplies background on her principals succinctly and naturally. Ashwin’s sister Nandita (Dilnaz Irani) thinks her brother called off his wedding because Sabina had had a fling with someone else. Not so, says Ashwin: he didn’t want Sabina enough; because she sensed this she looked elsewhere; he reckons he doesn’t want a long-term commitment. Ratna, serving drinks, overhears this conversation and it makes sense that she does: since she’s a nobody, Ashwin and Nandita can talk as if she weren’t there. Concerned that Ashwin can’t seem to shake off his low spirits, Ratna nevertheless plucks up the courage to tell him of her own marital history. She had wanted to study beyond secondary school but her parents insisted she wed a local man. He died four months after their wedding, leaving Ratna a widow at nineteen. Her family agreed to her coming to Mumbai because that meant one less mouth to feed. We learn from the same conversation that Ashwin had been living in New York City, trying to forge a career as a writer, when ‘my brother was diagnosed’ and he returned to India. He doesn’t expand on those four words in quotes but they’re enough to chime with the tetchy atmosphere between Ashwin and his father.
It’s no surprise, of course, that Ratna and Ashwin develop romantic feelings for each other but the context and the way in which this happens are distinctive. Here are two good-looking, unattached people of a similar age (mid- to late thirties) living in close proximity, and, post-Sabina, with no one else in the place. (Sabina’s driver bluntly tells Ratna that she’ll obviously have to start looking for a different posting.) Their feelings don’t develop at the same pace; Ratna and Ashwin view these feelings differently, according to their different status. Not only is she drawn to him sooner than he to her; she also seems ready to encourage greater conversational intimacy thanks to the sheer impossibility of there being any other kind of closeness between two people far apart on the social scale. Ratna is offended and forthright when she thinks Ashwin is making fun of her ambitions in fashion design. But when she gives him as a birthday present a shirt that she’s made, she’s shocked that he immediately wears it to work – as if publicly exposing her private affection for him. She anxiously pleads with him not to tell anyone who gave him the garment.
Ashwin always shows her a degree of courtesy quite lacking in the treatment of Ratna by other, affluent women in his life – his mother, his sister, the glamorous Ankita (Anupriya Goenka), who’s a guest at a party in his apartment. When Ratna accidentally spills wine on her dress, Ankita yells expletives at her and, as Ashwin tries to calm things, informs him that she knows from experience how to deal with ‘fucking idiots’ of servants. Ashwin’s quiet reply that it’s therefore a good job Ratna doesn’t work for her only inflames the situation. He’s prepared, then, to stand up for his obliging, competent maid but coming to see her as anything more is a very gradual process. Once Ashwin realises how his view of her is changing, he’s well aware that his friends and family won’t stand for it, and is himself ambivalent. Yet his sense of entitlement allows him to think of a relationship with Ratna in a way she can’t – as a potential reality.
The difference between them is most poignantly expressed when Ratna has briefly returned to her village and Ashwin calls her there. Most of Ratna’s wages in Mumbai are used to fund the college education of Choti (Bhagyashree Pandit), her younger sister. For her part, Choti is merely envious of her big sister’s life in the big city, and wants to get there too. Ratna is angry to learn that Choti is getting married, and ready to give up her studies, in order to move to Mumbai with her husband. She nevertheless asks Ashwin for leave to attend Choti’s wedding. She’s astonished to receive his phone call. They chat, pleasantly though uncertainly, for a few seconds before Ratna asks if Ashwin wants something. He can’t just be calling to talk to her – there must be some chore he needs her to do. Yet his answer is no.
When Ashwin buys Ratna a fashion magazine, it’s by way of apology for having seemed to belittle her career hopes: he assures her everyone in the fashion business reads the magazine. His later present of a sewing machine, though more significant, hardly breaks the bounds of propriety but Ratna finds it increasingly hard to subdue her unutterable feelings. Ashwin goes out to a bar with his (male) friend Vicky (Chandrachoor Rai) and brings a girl home. Ratna encounters her emerging from Ashwin’s bedroom next morning; shocked, she dutifully brings the glass of water that the girl requests. A pivotal shift in relations with Ashwin occurs during the Ganesh festival. Ratna is dancing with her older friend Laxmi (Geetanjali Kulkarni), who is also a maid, just outside the apartment block when Ashwin returns home. Declining an invitation to join the dance, he enters the building and Ratna follows. ‘You believe in God, then?’ he jokes. ‘I have to believe, sir,’ she replies, not joking. In the apartment she’s perspiring from her exertions outside. Ashwin can’t resist taking her in his arms.
This is virtually the kiss of death for the relationship. While Ashwin wants to persuade himself they have a future together, Ratna knows better. She won’t even, as he keeps requesting her to do, call him Ashwin, rather than ‘sir’. (First shown in critics’ week at Cannes in 2018, the film was released in India with the alternative English title, Is Love Enough Sir? – which is a travesty of its emotional complexity.) An upsetting scene at Ashwin’s parents’ home vindicates her – as it does Vicky, who has reminded his friend, candidly but not unkindly, that someone like Ratna doesn’t even use cutlery. She’s one of four servants working at Ashwin’s mother’s party. On their break, they sit on the kitchen floor, using fingers to eat their food. Ashwin interrupts to ask Ratna if he should wait to give her a lift back; she says no. Once he’s left the kitchen, one of the male servants sarcastically asks Ratna, ‘Do you want me to wait for you?’ When she does return to the apartment, she angrily tells Ashwin of this humiliation. Soon afterwards, she packs her bags. Assuring Ashwin that she’ll find another job and doesn’t need any financial help, she takes her leave and goes to stay with her sister and brother-in-law, who are now in Mumbai. (Choti’s husband has agreed to let her continue her studies but their drab, poky surroundings are already dispelling her illusions of the glamour of city living.)
‘If you care anything about her, you’ll keep your distance,’ Vicky tells Ashwin. Although Ratna takes action on that first, he soon follows. He explains to his father that he’s not in a relationship with Ratna but that he loves her, He has therefore decided to return to America to live: just as well in the circumstances, his father replies. Since Ashwin’s departure is, at the very least, inconvenient for his father’s business, that terse response is an incisive comment on the magnitude of the social scandal that’s being avoided (though it’s a pity we don’t get to see Ashwin’s mother’s reaction too). Some time after he’s gone, Ratna is invited to an interview with a clothes designer who turns out to be Ankita. They exchange apologies for the wine incident – Ratna nervously, Ankita breezily. When she gets the job she has long hankered after Ratna knows who she has to thank for it. This plot twist sounds pat but I don’t think it is. Ashwin is determined to do something for Ratna, and in a socially acceptable way. It makes sense that their exchange at the party caused no lasting damage to his friendship with Ankita – who is too smart to let a spat with a servant stop her from exploiting Ratna’s talent.
Now in her late forties, Rohena Gera wrote for Indian cinema and television some years ago, and in 2013 made a documentary, What’s Love Got to Do with It? (to quote an IMDb note, ‘an amusing portrayal of privileged urban Indians coming to terms with expectations about love, marriage, happiness and tradition’). Sir, her first non-fiction feature, has one of the best scripts I’ve come across in recent years. (The dialogue is mostly in Hindi, with some English and Marathi.) As a director, Gera has a touch that’s subtle and sure – for example, in the very occasional bursts of energy that contrast vitally with the glancing remarks and guarded looks dominating the narrative. The Ganesh festival sequence features the second of two bouncy songs on the soundtrack. Their upbeat, life-is-for-living lyrics seem facile (are easier said than done anyway) but their music is truly energising. Ratna can lose herself in the festival dancing – just as Ashwin, in a game of squash with Vicky, can chase his blues away.
I’ve seen Tillotama Shome before – playing another maid, in Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (2001), where Shome made her screen debut – but confess I don’t remember her from that. (I liked the film a lot but it’s years ago that I saw it.) As Ratna, she’s impeccably good as a woman acutely aware of her social limitations but set on achieving a kind of independence. Vivek Gomber, excellent in Court (2014), was awkward and seemed miscast in his buffoonish role in another Nair-directed piece, last year’s TV adaptation of A Suitable Boy, but Sir is a different matter. It brings Gomber’s gift for telling understatement to the fore, and he’s first rate. Both lead actors are physically very right. Even as Ratna returns to Mumbai at the start, you see a quiet determination – almost a pride – in the way she carries herself. As the story progresses, Ashwin often stands rooted to the spot. It’s an expression of his powerlessness in the social system of which he’s part.
Ratna is definite when they part company that she wants no further contact with Ashwin. Now, eager to thank him for recommending her to Ankita, she returns to his apartment to find the door padlocked. She goes sadly up to the roof of the block, where she once talked with him, and looks out on the city. Her phone rings. This final call, even shorter than the one Ratna received while with her family for Choti’s wedding, is no less perfectly judged. When she picks up Ashwin’s voice says, ‘Hello, Ratna?’ Her one-word reply, after a long pause, addresses him, for the first and only time, by name instead of status. It’s a perfect ending to a splendid film but the effect of Sir, like that of many good movies before it, is to make you want to know how the people in it are doing now.
7 April 2021