Mitr, My Friend: Revathy’s National Award-winning directorial debut is an ode to identities lost in transit

As they engage in a hearty discussion, the nostalgia of their home-made local cuisine takes hold of the air alongside a palpable dissonance they feel with their subsequent younger generations. Revathy’s directorial debut, a moving portrayal of a woman’s translocation to the US, which also won the National Award for Best Feature Film in English, encapsulates this idea very succinctly. 

The movie begins with Lakshmi, played by Shobhana in a National Award-winning performance, meeting her to-be-husband Prithvi (Naseer Abdullah) in their Chidambaram home. In a beautifully edited montage sequence, Revathy establishes the pair as someone who met through the format of an arranged marriage but eventually fall in love with each other. This early stretch, which sees the couple through their wedding in India to their earliest days trying to make it in California is also reminiscent of films like Mani Ratnam’s Roja and and Mira Nair’s The Namesake.

In an interview, Nair had said how she looked at her own journey as an immigrant in the States to show the initial days that Ashima and Ashok spend setting up base in Cambridge, Massachusetts – using successive shots put together with sharp cuts. Revathy does the same. We are shown a fleeting shot of Shobhana as she leaves the country with tears in her eyes, followed by expansive long shots of the couple exploring shopping malls together and making their first calls back home. There is a very cheeky sequence of Lakshmi pulling her husband away from a shop selling red lingerie – directly linking the idea of her sexuality and identity to the narrative of the film.

A shot from the opening sequence of the film, where Prithvi’s family comes to see Lakshmi and the latter performs music for them (Photo: Movie Still)

But even before the opening credits end, Revathy clearly establishes the fundamentals of her lead characters. For as viewers, they are not characters yet. They are mere archetypes of small-town outliers who made it to one of the biggest immigrant havens of the world. Before we even realise, Revathy makes a massive 17-year jump and lands us bang in the middle of the narrative that she wants us to see. The true story of what is sold to us as happily-ever-after.

We now meet Lakshmi as a tired, overworked housewife preparing an anniversary meal for Prithvi, who owing to the varied demands of work, no longer has any time for his wife or her domestic needs. Lakshmi spends most of her time attending to her huge mansion and caring for a daughter – a first generation Indian-American hybrid. There is an ever-widening chasm between mother and daughter owing to cultural differences. A mother who still clings on to her native value systems as the only source for her identity and a daughter who is unable to make sense of her displaced status.

Although the narrative is propelled by an anniversary dinner gone wrong, Revathy builds up her story as a curation of the most ordinary moments in the lives of these people. Look out for a brilliantly crafted scene early on where the daughter Divya (Preeti Vissa) demonstrates to her mother why exactly she doesn’t want her to touch her things. She explains how she throws her bag to the left and drops her wristband to her right – a routine she does not expect her mother to understand, who tries to tidy a messed-up room in order by placing things in their designated places. The bite of this scene is felt, not only because this is a truth that is rooted in the immigrant experience but also because it is an experiential reality of every teenager in this generation.

Sample another scene, this time between the couple. Prithvi invites his colleague and his girlfriend home for dinner. He asks Lakshmi to get ready for the same and the latter obeys and drapes herself in a sky-blue chiffon piece, gifted to her earlier by Prithvi. When asked how she looks, Prithvi, without batting an eyelid, responds she does not look good anymore. Shobhana, who remains bereft of any makeup or external bling over the course of the film, puts forth a face that crumples up in pent-up hurt. Love fades eventually, but what takes its place is habit. But in this case, all that has settled as residue is indifference.

Lakshmi before Prithvi’s guest, in the blue saree he had gifted her many years back (Photo: Movie Still)

Unlike Nora Ephron’s romantic-comedy classic You’ve Got Mail or Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Antaheen, Mitr, My Friend does not use the trope of the virtual chat room to further a romantic plot point. It instead uses the same to interrogate the loneliness of the character – who doesn’t seek romantic fulfilment online, but just a friend to share her woes with. It is through this online friendship that Lakshmi eventually comes to realise her true identity, beyond the confines of her roles as a mother and as a wife. She realises, for the first time, her potential as a woman with interests, likes and dislikes of her own that are removed from the needs of her immediate family members. 

Despite the generic sound tone of the narrative, Revathy peppers the film with moments that are unique. Where a regular film might have used Lakshmi’s journey of self-discovery by perhaps making her rekindle her practice of Carnatic music, Revathy makes her character – wait for it – take an interest in carpentry. For a brown skinned American woman, this is too masculine a choice but Revathy almost deliberately steers clear of these cliches.

In a later scene in the film when Prithvi returns home and announces that he won’t have dinner, Lakshmi just quietly picks up the chopped-up vegetables and flushes it down the sink. Not a single word is exchanged as a top-shot, pivoted from staircase, pans and settles on the face of a shocked Prithvi. Usually female immigrant narratives do not shy away from interrogating questions of female sexuality – in this case the only hints of romance in the narrative are with Lakshmi’s association with a young white boy who is her neighbour. The Oedipal dynamics of this association are not brushed under the carpet, more than one person accuses Lakshmi of having an affair with the boy although the former repeatedly clarifies that the association is purely based on a desire for mutual companionship in the face of unprocessed displacement. 

Lakshmi exploring the many affordances of the virtual chatroom (Photo: Movie Still)

Despite this being a film about the mother and her journey of self-discovery, Revathy doesn’t necessarily villainise the daughter. She maintains an acute balancing act. Moments of conflict between the two are framed with a hand-held camera with Revathy positioning her shots and choosing moments that almost quietly implore us to look at Lakshmi’s own excessive protectiveness towards Divya. Emancipation for the self cannot come at the cost of the stagnation of another. It is only when mother-daughter mutually understand each other that they are able to come together.

The ending might seem rushed and labelled as convenient to suit the larger demand of the narrative, but the point of the film is never to tell a story that will shock or stun. Rather it is to understand these hordes of men and women who cross the seas every year, in search of the promise of a better life. But how much of themselves do they lose in transit? And what do they do with the residues of that which doesn’t get lost? In a career that spans more than three decades of outstanding cinema, these seminal questions are answered by Revathy with great deftness in her debut directorial feature that clearly established her not just as a culturally rooted performer but also an equally astute narrator.