‘Songs of Forgotten Trees’ Venice Review: Two Women Seeking Connection in Mumbai

Getting by alone in a big city can be very complicated. In Songs of Forgotten Trees, two women find themselves in this situation in none other than Mumbai, India’s chaotic and overcrowded metropolis. When Anuparna Roy’s delicate film begins, the two women don’t know each other, though they share the same living space. Swetha has just arrived from her village and rents a room from Thooya, who already lives there. At first, each of them goes about her business as if sharing an apartment meant nothing: they don’t talk, they barely exchange glances, they keep to themselves. But that begins to change, and the film’s minimalist yet sensitive story emerges from this slow transformation.

Swetha works from her computer at a call center for a service company. She doesn’t know anyone in the city and goes on a few dates with people she meets online, always coming back with a look of disinterest. Thooya’s life is more complex, more entangled in the tensions of the big city. She is an actress but struggles to find work despite constant auditions and rehearsals. In fact, she channels her acting talent into her real job, which resembles that of a geisha: she receives men at her home, entertains them, chats, drinks, allows some intimacy, though sex isn’t necessarily involved. Thooya acts out the fantasies her clients carry with them, and that’s all.

Despite their very different lives and personalities, the two women gradually start to connect — talking, cooking together, sharing their problems, fears, and complicated personal circumstances. Through generally long takes —one extended scene unfolds across two adjacent bathrooms, another inside a car, and so on— Roy builds this web of mirrors, reflections, and doubles, where the women’s lives intertwine as they spend much of their time in the apartment, receiving visitors in person or connecting online.

With subtlety and elegance in the apartment’s confined spaces, and with clever framing and camera angles that capture feelings the characters cannot express verbally —chiefly loneliness and isolation— Roy weaves a story about friendship, companionship, and connection between two women who, without fully admitting it, need one another. It isn’t strictly a tale of blossoming friendship —their differences are too great for that— but rather one of connection, of mutual support, of making the other feel she is not alone in the world.

Meanwhile, Mumbai keeps moving at its frantic pace, some of Thooya’s clients reveal their more obnoxious sides, and a late twist reshapes some of our assumptions about her lifestyle and her relationships. But Songs of Forgotten Trees is not a film that relies on plot twists or shocking revelations. Instead, it flows through the sensations, desires, and needs —sometimes aligned, sometimes at odds— of its protagonists: two women who connect in order to feel less alone in an overwhelming world.