Unhappy housewife Shobana sees her life take a turn for the better in a cyber chat room.

'Mitr-My Friend'

The Plot

It's been eighteen years since Lakshmi (Shobana) followed husband Prithvi (Nasir Abdullah) to the U.S. Daughter Divya (Preeti Vissa) is a typical American teenager who finds Lakshmi's motherly care stifling, and the husband is so busy with his entrepreneurial dreams that he's even stopped coming home for dinner. When Divya moves out, Lakshmi finds solace by sharing her feelings with 'Mitr', who she meets in a chat room. Soon, Prithvi finds her a much different person and begins to suspect something's afoot.

The Review

As 'Mitr' begins, a Tamilian girl is singing a Carnatic piece to impress a suitor. The first stanza of the song plays while the matchmaking, the 'check out the bride' ceremony as an American later calls it, is happening. As the song carries on to subsequent stanzas, you see the wedding occurring with the associated pomp and gaiety. You then watch the bride tearfully taking leave of her parents, as the same Carnatic piece acquires rock beats and a quick-cut montage tells us that we're now in California's Bay Area.

This is such a well-oiled sequence that the rush is instantaneous. With deft strokes, director Revathy lays out not only her characters' back story but also wordlessly tells us that this song, a metaphor for Lakshmi's strong cultural roots, has followed her to her new home. She will carry it around long after she begins life as a soccer mom to brattish Divya.

How different a film turns out when handled by a woman! The first name we see in the opening credits is Shobana's, and as with Meghna Gulzar's 'Filhaal', you get refreshingly offbeat takes on situations.

Right after an outburst, Lakshmi busies herself scrubbing and cleaning the house. She hears a friend is coming over for dinner and her first reaction is to look into the fridge to see what's in there. She talks to her flowers. And she discovers a life outside the four walls, learning carpentry and such, which thankfully is not shown as a feminist statement of empowerment.

Revathy also displays good visual sense, aided by cinematographer Fowzia Fathima. The chat scenes, which could have become tedious with just the computer screen and Lakshmi, are opened up wonderfully. We hear the contents of the chat session in the background as she carries on with household chores. Her spelling mistakes while chatting (she types 'anyone' as 'anuyone') are especially cute.

The screenplay neatly embraces American characters (neighbours Steve and Paul, Prithvi's secretary Pam), making them interesting counterpoints to the happenings in Lakshmi's domestic life. You just wish a few overwrought touches had been avoided, like a very literal scene in which Lakshmi places her head on Prithvi's shoulder as he turns away. (Get it? She doesn't even have a shoulder to cry on!)

But you don't really mind, with Shobana acting up a quiet, dignified storm at the centre. When she says it breaks her heart to care and not show it, you want to slap everyone around her to their senses for not recognising her worth. And was it my imagination or did she actually affect a more pronounced accent in her English in the flashback scenes?

The first hour or so of this relatively short film is wonderfully on the ball. Suddenly, the gentle piano notes in the soundtrack turn to thundering music as the film lurches to lurid melodrama, with Divya suspecting Lakshmi of infidelity. Their reconciliation is equally sudden, with a sly message about the worth of Indian tradition, as in 'look what happens to girls who leave home in big, bad America'. Soon enough, Divya's in salwars and calls Lakshmi 'Amma'.

Again, the acting saves these scenes as Preeti spontaneously spews out her teen angst most convincingly. Nasir Abdullah flounders a bit with his over-animatedness (a leftover from his ad days?), but he's good in the serious scenes, like the one where Divya tells him not to worry as she's a big girl now and he confusedly replies 'sometimes being big has nothing to do with anything'.

After all that sensitivity, the movie leaps from the realms of 'Astitva' to 'You've Got Mail', as Lakshmi tries to meet her unknown 'Mitr'. But there's a genuinely loopy enthusiasm to these proceedings and you certainly don't deny Lakshmi a happy ending, however contrived and predictable.

The latter parts may be pure 'masala', but they cap off an absorbing, often humorous look at a very real culture clash.

The Rating

As you leave the theatre with a light heart, you also wonder if this spate of small films could mean the resurgence of something like the parallel film movement of the seventies, or even the clean Basu Chatterjee films. That prospect gives you almost as big a high as the entertaining 'Mitr'.

Baradwaj Rangan

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