The interiority brings to mind the award-winning All We Imagine As Light by Payal Kapadia (one of the executive producers of Shape of Momo), another tender drama about the illusions of belonging for those stranded between identities. Rai’s film is a little more on the nose, though. But the nose is sensitive enough. The title refers to Bishnu’s inability to make a conventionally-shaped momo. “It’s the taste that matters,” she declares, delivering an allegory for the shapelessness of her own personality. Gaumaya Gurung plays Bishnu in a way that allows the script to not oversell the subtext. It’s a turn full of silent perception and body language. As the character tries to navigate her new (but old) reality, she realises the irony of abandoning the truths of womanhood to stand out as an antidote to fitting in.
Bishnu ends up ‘performing’ a sense of masculinity at times, despite looking down on her family’s habit of securing the premises by pretending that a patriarch lives with them. Her dissent is reactionary, too, most evident in a moment where she puffs on a cigarette as soon as she hears her boyfriend say that “girls shouldn’t smoke anyway”. She is determined to be the catalyst of a social-message drama until she is pummeled by the bitter learnings of a coming-of-age tragedy. There’s much to admire about the manner in which Gurung’s Bishnu retreats from the linearity of the future she chooses. She can’t understand why she does not understand; she can’t long if she does not belong. It isn’t framed as the panic of someone who feels stifled by the place; it’s the crisis of someone who cannot accept her own suffocation. If it takes a city to diminish her agency, it takes a village — her village — to raise her hopes. In many ways, all she imagines is light. But all she doesn’t imagine is the dimness of it.
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