Tribeny Rai’s ‘Shape of Momo’ opens with a simple scene. Bishnu, the protagonist, has written a poem for a smartphone advertisement on the front page of a newspaper. Her proud mother reads it aloud to a room full of villagers, mostly men. There is a moment of genuine admiration, and then, in the same breath, the conversation shifts from her achievement to how her parents have educated her well, before curdling into speculation about her marriage prospects and potential grooms. It is a sequence that lasts perhaps a few minutes, yet it contains the film’s premise: that the world will always find a way to remind a woman that her achievements are provisional and her ambitions a detour on the road to domesticity.

‘Shape of Momo’, Rai’s debut feature, has travelled an extraordinary international circuit for a first feature. The film won two awards at the 30th Busan International Film Festival, and screened in the New Directors’ section at San Sebastián — a significant achievement for a Nepali-language film from a part of India that mainstream Indian cinema has historically treated as a scenic backdrop.

“It was important for me to tell this story from my place, and in my language,” Rai says. “It feels great to be the protagonists of our own stories finally. Though it’s very rooted in my place and my village, it has a universal appeal because everybody has a family. Everyone knows a house full of women. They all have this relationship and experiences around them.”

Set in and shot in the villages of Nandok and Assam Lingzey in East Sikkim, ‘Shape of Momo’ follows Bishnu (Gaumaya Gurung), a spirited 32-year-old who returns to her ancestral Himalayan village after quitting her city job. Back home, she is surrounded by three generations of women in her family: her grandmother, who is waiting for her son to take her away to Dubai, where he has settled; her mother, who endures life’s hardships without question; and her pregnant sister, Junu, who is trying to escape troubles at home with her husband and mother-in-law.

This, as Rai puts it, is a “house full of women." The men are conspicuously absent: Bishnu’s father has passed away; her uncle has settled in Dubai; her brother-in-law remains an unheard voice on the phone for most of the film; and she feels ambivalent towards Gyan, a potential lover, who is, by Rai’s own admission, one of the “nicest men you will find."

There are no villains in ‘Shape of Momo’, in the traditional sense. The men are not necessarily antagonists — they are only antagonistic in their absence, and rarely, in their presence. And yet, patriarchy is all-pervasive. It shapes and controls every aspect of the women’s lives, even in the absence of a patriarch. The antagonism they are subjected to is not individual; it’s structural. ‘Shape of Momo’ is remarkable for how precisely Rai maps this architecture of invisible violence that women experience every single day.

The discourse around feminist cinema and women’s rights has been historically organised around visible acts of male aggression, such as demands of dowry, honour killings, and intimate partner violence. But Rai is more interested in the more subtle mechanics of patriarchal violence: the way its internalised hierarchy reproduces itself through habit, care, and even the language of love. Remove the men, and the structure stands. The women police each other. They police themselves. Patriarchy simply becomes “the way things are done.” This is not so much “cruelty” as it is “normalcy”, and normalcy, Rai argues, is the most effective instrument of subjugation.

Take Gyan, Bishnu’s love interest, for example. He is, as Rai acknowledges, essentially a good person — a 'nice guy'. He is educated, has his own architecture practice, gentle, and emotionally available by the standards of the modern social milieu — the kind of contemporary man we might celebrate. And yet, we see him falter twice in moments that crystallise the mundane mathematics of gender politics. In one scene, he tells Bishnu that smoking doesn’t suit women, then immediately backtracks, saying, “My mother says so,” when Bishnu pushes back. In another, he leaves a plate of momos on the table and goes to wash his hands without taking it to the sink — a gesture so small it barely registers, except that it registers completely, because it assumes, without thinking, that someone else will clean up after him. That someone else is implicitly Bishnu or her mother, a woman. Gyan exemplifies how even supposedly progressive men benefit from regressive patriarchy and how, knowingly or unknowingly, they normalise gender inequality.

These scenes stand out for their rarity in mainstream Indian cinema — not the ideas behind them, which are hardly new to feminist theory, but their refreshing rendering as ordinary domestic moments, unglamorous and unaccompanied by dramatic music. The bad men of Indian feminist cinema give 'good' Indian men an easy exit. By showing us a 'good man' who is exactly like them, a good man who is nonetheless shaped by patriarchal assumptions he has never examined, Rai closes that exit. She refuses to let anyone off the hook.

But Rai is not interested in condemning Gyan or men like Gyan. “I am not sending a message saying, hey, man, you should change. I just hope it makes them reflect,” she says. “People always tell me I am complaining about nothing because our region is far more progressive than the mainland, and there’s no inequality. But I think it’s up to the women to decide what is equal enough.”

Bishnu, the protagonist of ‘Shape of Momo’, is what we might call an unlikeable main character. She is, by turns, principled and uncompromising, compassionate and dismissive, admirably self-aware and strikingly blind to her own contradictions; her lack of class awareness, and her cruelty towards those she perceives as beneath her, such as Padam, the handyman, and the tenants who look after her mother’s orange orchard. She nurtures ideals of female independence while struggling to make a perfectly shaped momo — a metaphor for society’s impossible expectations of women — and reacts to this inadequacy with a mix of pride and shame. She is, in other words, a real person.

“We wanted to break this,” Rai says. “We wanted to portray a real reflection of today’s women. We are selfish. We contradict ourselves. We are far too critical of ourselves and society.”

Bishnu’s imperfection is not a narrative flaw of the film but a radical political argument. A woman who champions equality and yet treats her tenants with condescension is not a hypocrite in the simple sense — she is a person shaped by the same hierarchies she is trying to resist. The feminist ideal, pressed too hard, becomes its own kind of cage.

The politics of ‘Shape of Momo’ extends beyond the domain of gender and encompasses the politics of class and migration. Two parallel sub-plots involving class and migration run through the film: one follows the migrant construction workers who camp in Bishnu’s mother’s land, and are perceived as suspicious outsiders by the women as well as the village at large; the other follows the family of tenants who live in a house on the orange orchard.

The tenants’ situation is economically precarious, their housing is insecure, and their presence in Sikkim is the result of migration driven by structural poverty. Bishnu, the progressive woman who resents how the world reduces her, is not empathetic toward them.

Rai is direct about what this is meant to depict. “We are all very aware of the discrimination that people from the Northeast face in the country,” she says. “We don’t look a certain way, so we are always called foreigners. But if you come to our place, you will see the same kind of discrimination that the outside people often face.” It is a brave thing for a filmmaker to say about her own community, and braver still to dramatise in her directorial debut. The Northeastern communities of India have a legitimate and extensively documented grievance about how they are treated in Indian cities — the racial slurs, the harassment, the being asked for passports in their own country. But ‘Shape of Momo’ insists that carrying this legitimate grievance does not exempt anyone from examining the discrimination they themselves practice.

Bishnu’s blind spot around class is not incidental to her character. It is what makes her fully human. She is a woman who understands one kind of oppression from the inside and struggles to recognise another. The tenant’s son, who behaves aggressively toward Bishnu in ways he would never dare toward a man of equivalent social standing (Rai makes this explicit) is simultaneously a young man ground down by economic precarity and a beneficiary of gendered entitlement. His mother makes excuses for his behaviour, while Bishnu’s mother tells her, repeatedly, to “Let it go, learn to behave.” The men always get the benefit of doubt.

Migration is the condition that shapes everything in ‘Shape of Momo’. Bishnu migrates to Delhi for work and agency, and returns to her village to search for her sense of self, which she has arguably lost in the city. Her uncle has migrated to Dubai and has effectively abandoned the family, especially his aged mother, in the process. The tenant family and the workers have also migrated in search of livelihood. The film’s psychological landscape is one of departures and what we lose when we leave.

A pervasive sense of loss flows under the surface of ‘Shape of Momo’ like an undercurrent. The loss of relatives, the loss of ambition, the loss of a pet, the loss of love, the loss of autonomy illustrates that every loss in life generates further loss in life. “I think because I lost my father early on, I grew up with a deep sense of loss,” Rai says. “I’m constantly afraid of losing people, of losing things. I live with my mother in our village home, and every other moment I find myself thinking something might happen to her. Growing up also makes you realize how much life is shaped by losing. There are so many people you once knew who are no longer there — they have either moved away or passed on. In that sense, especially in the modern world, we are constantly living with loss: of people, of culture, of language, of ways of being.”

This profound sense of loss is everywhere, even in the film’s linguistic stakes. Rai made ‘Shape of Momo’ in Nepali — her mother tongue, the language of her Sikkimese community — in part because she wanted to preserve something. “Not many films come from Sikkim. This is one of the first few films that has traveled to festivals. I really want to preserve it.”

Indian independent cinema has had a strong few years at international festivals, but ‘Shape of Momo’ stands out for what it is not, as much as for what it is. It is not a feminist film in the template sense of the term. It is not a film that flatters its audience by positioning women as purely innocent victims or righteous champions. It is not a film that resolves all its contradictions clearly by its ending. It is something rarer than a feminist film, or a regional film, or an art-house film, although it is all of these. It is a portrait of a society that has not yet caught up with the women living inside it, and a protagonist who has not yet caught up with herself.

There is a moment near the end of the film when Bishnu seems on the verge of simply surrendering to society’s expectations, to fatigue, to the gravity of the life her mother and sister and grandmother have already accepted. She looks at her pregnant sister surrounded by village women, who are reassuring her that she will have a son, and she sees herself for a split second. Rai does not entirely resolve whether Bishnu does or doesn’t surrender to this eventuality. Rai withholds that comfort because the question of whether a woman stays or leaves, conforms or resists, is never really answered once and for all. It is answered, and re-answered, and answered again, every day.

‘Shape of Momo’ releases theatrically across India and Nepal on May 29.

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