If On A Winter’s Night Review | Sanju Surendran Excavates Doldrums Of Love In An Unfamiliar City

Sanju Surendran’s If On A Winter’s Night (Khidki Gaav), which had its world premiere at the ongoing Busan International Film Festival, opens with a succession of swift cuts and brief scenes. A young couple from Kerala, Abhi (Roshan Abdool Rahoof) and Sara (Bhanu Priyamvada), set up a new life in Delhi. She has landed a gig that’ll let them stay for a few months in the city, while he drifts around, scrambling to cobble together an exhibition for his art. Tenuous though the couple find everything in Delhi, they try not to be dogged by it.

The story of the couple wends into a portrait of life in an alien city. There’s so much to constantly mediate, delicately traverse—language, culture, a way of life. While there are promises of freedom from a repressive family, there’s also an unforgiving flux in which outsiders are constantly kept. Within the flick of a moment, you might find your home—clinched on tight resources—wrested away. Is stable anchorage a fleeing illusion, then? How do you build a future with endless dread? To immigrants, the city is unsparing, skeptical. The landlady sneers about maintaining social class and respectability, while two friends, Simon (Jitheesh R Samuel) and Gopika (Arathy KB), often crash at their flat. For Abhi and Sara, a place of their own is overrun by the latter duo in the quest of shelter, workaday and emotional. Home is slippery, fragile, changing meaning and dimension for individuals in variant contexts. Each flails for a shard of it, hoping to lean on the generosities of others before making a foothold.

Despite a slimness that perforates it, If On A Winter’s Night does look with deep earnestness into the cross-knit emotional and financial realities of coupledom in not-so-favourable circumstances. Stepping back from bright, adoring smiles of early puppy love, Surendran sizes up the seamier sides. Abhi and Sara live within immense precarity. In limning a relationship’s tether with economics of bare survival, the film shares a kindred spirit with Parth Saurabh’s incisive Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar (2022). Within coupledom, how exactly do financial and emotional support square? When it gets too lopsided, how long till the relationship wanes away? But there’s love here, genuine and insistent to prove itself in spite of the tedium within practical needs. But is it enough to weather the severity of circumstance? Surendran handles this shifting terrain with unsentimental directness. There’s the waiting, seemingly endless frustrations, misgivings, the emotional labour of making a relationship stick.

If On A Winter’s Night chips away at any background score, sifting through pangs of unease in difficult conversations. The unobtrusive, unelevated aesthetic schema pushes for stringent, sobering realism. But Manesh Madhavan’s camera also retains a tender, caressing gaze at the couple. He shoots intimacy with impish, endearing giddiness—a balmy relief to the everyday grind that keeps breaking in.

Rahoof discreetly works his inherent scruffy charm into a blend of absolute sincerity and flippancy. Abhi is the kind who’ll lay everything on the other person, while innocently insisting on their own utter helplessness. He moves through the world with abandon—a lightness missing in Sara’s wary, super-sharp survival instincts. Rahoof’s gentle, unassuming performance makes you want to shake Abhi up, but also be as arrested by his guilelessness as Sara is. Abhi is as impetuous as Sara is clear-minded. She seems more acutely aware she can’t afford to fudge their finances on and on. She’s as pragmatic as incautiously floating Abhi is. She’s always lugging on the torture of a toxic family, who’s either controlling her or haranguing her to send money for her brother’s fees. Her mother coldly underlines that it’s her brother who’s most important to them. In Priyamvada’s performance is writ large the fatigue of being tied to an emotionally corrosive family, along with keeping her household steady.

Even afar, Sara gets no breather, persistently reminded of complying with family demands. Shorn of options by her parents, she clutches at whatever scrap of escape seems viable. As much as she tries not ceding, she is worn out by ensuring Abhi’s artistic needs are met, while balancing it out with her parents. Abhi leaves all major responsibilities to Sara. On her modest salary, she pays the bills, while he tries to keep the flat in order. Priyamvada carries the strain and stress in ways that expose the narrative’s latent restlessness within a deceptively measured pose.

Rekha Raj’s screenplay desists from tracing Abhi’s family. In spare throwaway bits, the film shares he comes from a more loving family than Sara’s, albeit poorer. But this does border on a bit of sketchiness. Despite Rahoof’s loose-limbed performance, If On A Winter’s Night struggles at times to root Abhi well, ascribe his impulses to a palpable context. You are also left wanting a keener familiarity with his relationship to art.

Yet, Surendran and Raj also work ambiguity to their advantage. The film never spells how long Sara and Abhi have been together. But their differences subtly flash forth. As rambling, open and free-spirited Abhi is, Sara maintains certain implacable boundaries. He soaks in the city, whereas she flinches. Surendran inserts few lovely touches. At one point, the couple and Simon jam in native Malayalam songs—a small reprieve amidst overwhelming remoteness that soon gets drowned out by a Hindi chant from outside. Later, this disruption flows into kind connection for Abhi. It’s this matter-of-fact register Surendran mines that pulls the film through. Even as situations seem to alleviate, danger and instability are never too far behind for the couple. Till its unsettling parting note, If On A Winter’s Night drives this with wrenching clarity. Vividly alert to life’s rocky temper, this brittle, mature drama preserves resilience as it does stakes amidst love.