Songs Of Forgotten Trees Review | Anuparna Roy’s Tale Of Two Roommates Risks Being Skin-deep

In Anuparna Roy’s debut feature Songs of Forgotten Trees, premiering in the Orizzonti competition at 82nd Venice Film Festival, intimacy and isolation co-habit. The relationship between roommates Thooya (Naaz Shaikh) and Swetha (Sumi Baghel) in Mumbai is shaded by this inextricable attachment. There is no elaborate narrative here. Roy isn’t interested in a conventional narrative setup, opting instead for moments and impressions, things left unspoken and un-negotiated. She assembles the film through fragments of scenes. Right when Swetha moves in, Thooya plainly lays out the arrangement as it is. Sharing the flat involves accepting Thooya’s sex work unquestioningly, sans disparagement. For the most part, Songs of Forgotten Trees delineates snatches of affinity and tussle between the women with casual candor. But there are also pockets of bristling evasion hewn into their mutual understanding. Initially, Swetha steps aside as she familiarises herself with Thooya’s routine, the sight of men flicking in and out of her room. The apartment owner too has struck a deal with Thooya, foregoing rent as exchange. Roy plunges us through these lives, compromises and projections, while the city pushes down.

Thooya’s loneliness singes the screen. She uses a cheerfully unapologetic front to mask layers of crippling grief. She believes she has built a strong enough armor to endure the emotional toll of her livelihood. Neither does she suffer fools nor allow herself to be viewed with pity. Sex work is what she has chosen to get by in the meantime before an acting break. But does she even believe in her dreams anymore? Could she now think she’ll never make out of the sea of anonymity? Thooya’s survival is predicated on pleasing, managing the whims of her clients, being their uncomplaining, patient listening ear. She goes about shuttling among the men with matter-of-fact unfussiness, stifling waves of nausea and repulsion. She has detached her emotional self completely. When her therapist nudges her into giving greater, sobering weight to what her work claims of her body and mind, Thooya deflects. Her choosing to side-step continues to cut deep within. However, Roy’s handling of Thooya’s chats with her therapist and clients tend to rankle.

How much has the grind of survival in the big city hollowed her out? Can she recognize the person she once was? These anxieties emboss the film, but Roy refrains from pressing any too imposingly. The only tether to Thooya’s childhood and roots in Assam is a long-lost friend, Jhuma. Thooya doesn’t know where she is, how she is doing. At one point, she wonders whether Jhuma is even alive. Yet, the memory of her friend haunts Thooya. The hollong trees of Assam and a local song Thooya hums run through the film as leitmotifs. She insists on the harshness of her childhood—a father who left and a mother who couldn’t let go. The sheer volatility that ensued must have been immense. Coupled with various other systemic coercions of her place, escape would only have been imminent. Guilt gnaws at her for the severance with her friend Jhuma, including her own stakes in it. Some of this turns a tad labored and expository.

Roy keeps Songs of Forgotten Trees concise. At just over an hour, the film isn’t going for sprawling thematic ambition. The pivot remains few threadbare emotional throughlines that grow to bind the roommates. Wisely and refreshingly, Roy’s screenplay abstains from over-sweetening, cloying the relationship Thooya and Swetha develop. Instead, moments of laughter, teasing camaraderie and deep empathy are juxtaposed with hurt and strife both unleash on the other. The film grows on us most when it lets the women meet in mutual kindness. A cup of tea one makes for the other, Thooya lending Swetha her fiery red sari as the latter goes out on a date—these simple instances gradually lead to a wrenching scene of the two performing a long overdue conversation, Swetha putting on the self of an absent, longed-for friend. Sheathed in make-believe, the playful scene—rounding out the catching up with an old friend—widens to add misgivings and qualms. Shaikh and Baghel evoke the creases and walls between the women. A rawness clings to their performances. Despite all the chafing and flinging out for reconciliation, various chasms pulling Thooya and Swetha apart anchor the center.

Yet, something about Songs of Forgotten Trees feels distractingly incoherent. Swetha often appears as a character shunted—her track as someone newly forging through Mumbai mostly incipient. Where’s her growth, any discernible outline of her moods and feelings? Yes, the discovery and exultation she’d initially find in uncharted spaces of an alien city are emphasised as being trampled by the thrust of her job, but the film barely affords her any clear, distinct personhood. The dates she goes on with a matrimonial match are similarly shortchanged. The film’s briefness works in curious, contradictory ways, clipping encounters that might have propped up characters in a more telling fashion. Yet, entire sequences resemble perfunctory fillers. Ashish Patel’s editing seems singularly perplexed by Roy’s vision, extending and cutting out in a mutually cancelling manner.

Disaffection papers itself over both Thooya and Swetha. Navigating transactional urban lives corrode intimacy for them. There are stray flashes when the equation between them takes on pronounced queer undertones. But these only swirl by. Largely, Roy boxes us within the cramped space of the flat, drawing out rejection, emotional distance and inaccessibility in the air. With DP Debjit Samanta framing characters through thresholds and the peripheral, this vicinity is charged by confrontations on a precipice. Yet, the women’s inner selves stay out of reach. So, though Roy admirably winds the film up in continuing unstable ground, its emotional punch scarcely stings.