'Sister Midnight' by Karan Kandhari

23 April 2025

On Saturday we were at the Curzon cinema at Milton Keynes Gallery to see ‘Sister Midnight’ - the debut feature film by British-Indian film-maker Karan Kandhari. This Hindi-language film, set in India, is beautiful, intriguing, funny, gruesome, confusing and incredibly weird! I think I enjoyed it, but it’s hard to be sure: I certainly haven’t stopped thinking about it. The film shows the early stages of married life in Mumbai following an arranged marriage between a couple from a village, who had only briefly met as children. (As they struggle to get on as husband and wife, Uma complains “You used to be so sensitive!” to which Gopal replies “I was eight!”) Kandhari presents a series of short, mostly wordless, beautifully constructed tableau scenes that demonstrate Uma’s hopeless, helpless days left alone in their one-room shack on a busy road while Gopal is at work. Bollywood star Radhika Apte is brilliant as Uma, conveying a rich palate of emotions largely through her eyes. There isn’t much of a narrative arc, but part-way through the film takes an odd turn towards black-comic horror. It’s hard to know what is supposed to be real and what might be Uma’s hallucinations, and it’s hard to see where the film is going. But Radhika Apte is a captivating actor and ‘Sister Midnight’ is an oddly enjoyable but very strange experience.

'Celestial Navigation' by Anne Tyler

17 April 2025

I am continuing to explore the early works of Anne Tyler, one of the great contemporary American novelists. Having read her 1980 novel ‘Morgan’s Passing’ (reviewed here in February 2022) I have now discovered ‘Celestial Navigation’ - Anne Tyler’s 5th novel, originally published in 1974. ‘Celestial Navigation’ has a quintessential Anne Tyler setting, focussing on domestic family life in Baltimore, but like ‘Morgan’s Passing’ it feels more experimental than her later, more famous, novels. It has a likeable eccentric main character, an interesting narrative structure and spans many years. Each chapter feels like a jump-cut as we leap forward in time and switch to the perspective of a different character, leaving the reader to fill in the jigsaw puzzle of what has happened since the previous chapter. Anne Tyler creates a cast of quirky oddballs living together in a house of lodgers, all of whom are amusing, exasperating and deeply sympathetic. It’s a light comic novel with real pathos and jeopardy - ultimately quite a sad story, but beautifully written and very engaging.

'A Tidy Ending' by Joanna Cannon

11 April 2025

The novelist Joanna Cannon seems to have a particular interest in the naive narrator. In ‘The Trouble with Goats and Sheep’ (reviewed here in January 2022) many of the novel’s chapters are narrated in the first person by 10-year-old Grace, and in 'Three Things About Elsie' (reviewed here in November 2023) the first person narrator is Florence, a woman in her 80s with failing memory, living in a retirement home. Joanna Cannon’s 2022 novel ‘A Tidy Ending’ similarly keeps the reader guessing about how much its protagonist really understands what is going on around her. It’s no mean feat to write a twisty thriller about a serial killer in the same gently quirky ‘cosy crime’ style as her previous novels without making it distasteful. ‘A Tidy Ending’ is intriguing, puzzling, creepy and cleverly plotted. 

Cruise from Malta

10 April 2025

We had a very enjoyable Mediterranean cruise last week on the P&O ship Azura, visiting Valletta in Malta, Athens in Greece and Heraklion and Chania in Crete. We particularly enjoyed our first visit to Valletta - a beautiful old town set on a plateau on a narrow peninsula with water on three sides. It's very pretty with some very grand buildings, all in a distinctive sand coloured stone, built in a grid system. In Athens we visited the Temple of Olympian Zeus next to Hadrian's Gate. This temple was larger than the Parthenon but only 15 of its 100 columns are still standing. There are good views from the site across to the Acropolis. We also visited the National Archaeological Museum which has an extensive collection of artifacts from ancient Greece, many dating from 3,000 years BC. From Heraklion we went to the Palace of Knossos - a fascinating archaeological site with some of the buildings reconstructed (in cement) by Sir Arthur Evans when he excavated the site in 1900. These reconstructions are gradually being replaced but they do give an idea of the scale of some of the buildings. Chania is a pretty town with a picturesque harbour but we didn't see it at its best, having arrived during a torrential thunderstorm. We had a lovely, relaxing cruise with good food, company and dancing.