In 2023, director Anuparna Roy reinvigorated conventional South Asian cinema’s themes of poverty, privilege and patriarchy with her debut short film Run To The River. With this work, set in British-occupied Bengal during the early 1900s, Roy positioned herself as a confident storyteller, committed to expanding the repertoire of subcontinental stories on-screen. With her feature debut Songs of Forgotten Trees, Roy returns now to modern-day Mumbai, but her attempt to curate a slow, rhythmic narrative is compromised by weak character development and an incredibly short 77-minute runtime.
The film follows two female flatmates, Thooya (Naaz Shaikh) and Swetha (Sumi Baghel), as they navigate the ever-present tensions in between the folds of patriarchy, domesticity and urbanity. Our introduction to Thooya is defined by her uncharitable and apathetic nature almost instantly, as she reluctantly decides to part with money for her father’s funeral. In contrast, Swetha is amicable and polite, out of her depth with Thooya’s loudness and choosing to ignore rather than engage. As the first fifteen minutes – nearly a quarter of the film – close out, it becomes apparent that Thooya has an arrangement with her landlord Nitin (Bushan Shimpi): she indulges his physical pleasure instead of paying rent.
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These opposing mannerisms and demeanours give Shaikh and Baghel the opportunity to demonstrate their competency as actors, with standout snippets towards the end of the film elucidating the clear contrast in their values, through Swetha’s well-acted disapproval of Thooya’s sex work.
It takes a little longer to understand Swetha’s part to play in the city, but her first meeting with a potential husband – found through a matrimonial matchmaking platform – exposes her main insecurity: she is lonely. Seeking companionship for the sake of companionship fails to satisfy the craving for connection that she begins to seek out through the united mundanity of domestic life with Thooya, offering them both a brief sense of belonging.
There are ample junctures for Roy’s screenplay to steer these two women towards an inkling of fulfilment rather than leaving them to fester in alienation, but despite cinematographer Debjit Samanta’s skilful utilisation of a minimalist apartment to showcase said opportunities, Roy is determined to maximise her brief runtime and instead missteps by introducing a third unseen character – named Jhuma – as a confusing motivation for Thooya’s values.
It’s only from Roy’s directorial statement accompanying the film that Jhuma’s inclusion becomes clear; Roy’s childhood friend – also named Jhuma – was married at 13 and subsequently vanished from Roy’s life. The unseen Jhuma in Songs of Forgotten Trees only manages to burden the film with more questions that it never really ends up posing, let alone answering.
There are glimpses of Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light in Roy’s direction, with conversations clouded by traffic, streetlamps uplighting faces, and songs sung in a kitchen amidst dinner preparations. These sentiments help highlight the female intimacies of Thooya and Swetha’s connection, however unexplored it may be as the film concludes. Roy remains able to balance location, culture and pace well enough, but in the absence of an airtight character arc, Roy’s conceptual musing on urban resilience remains fragile and potentially misconstrued.
