Growth: "Songs of Forgotten Trees"

"Presented by" Anurag Kashyap in his role as the Hindi cinema's most forceful moderniser, Anuparna Roy's Songs of Forgotten Trees has the air of an odd-couple flatshare comedy redirected into more naturalistic and reflective territory; its heroines' apartment block would appear to stand equidistant between recent critics' darling All We Imagine As Light and Claudia Weill's repertory fave Girlfriends. The flatmates here are two women occupying different positions in Mumbai society. Shweta (Sumi Baghel) is an IT worker and the new girl in town, a bit of a country mouse who flinches at the city's noise and men. Naaz Shaikh's Thooya, on the other hand, is a sex worker and aspirant actress struggling to process the recent death of her father, her last living relative: she's started to think anew of both an old school friend and one of her elderly clients, who didn't so much as lay a finger on her, although these fond reveries are sporadically interrupted by an altogether less positive relationship with her (married) cheeseball of a landlord. Roy watches the pair's initially tentative interactions, catching in passing those lonely nights when one or both parties have nothing better to do than gaze longingly out of the window at the city beyond; every now and again, though, the director cuts away to the mighty hollong trees swaying in some other part of the country. The implication appears to be that these girls are themselves trees, or at least saplings that might some day grow into trees - and who'd likewise go overlooked or otherwise taken for granted were it not for the loving gaze of Roy's camera.

It is, as you may sense from the above, a film that demands a certain patience on the viewer's part: what Roy sets herself to recapturing here is that period where we're still waiting for life to start and for a reason to go out into the world. For most of these 80 minutes, we're holed up in this embryonic flat, a sparsely furnished and carefully maintained nutshell, watching its inhabitants cooking, cleaning and washing, or humming to themselves in the downtime between meetings with their variously demanding clients; in their quiet, observational way, these commonplace back-and-forths tell you a lot about the state of play between men and women in today's India. It helps that both these actresses are very watchable: skilfully suggesting a growing bond while maintaining distinct personalities, these women come to fit together inside this poky flat like trees in the forest, providing mutual support, shade and cover. (By the closing image, their roots seem to have intertwined.) The one scene that doesn't wholly ring true is a late argument between the pair in the back of a cab - this, you feel, is Roy attempting to force some overt conflict into shot before the credits roll - although even this slight misstep yields a choice sequence of huffy laundry-folding: we've surely all known awkward moments in flatsharing like this. It remains a project that clearly needed some watering and tending to reach us. (Maybe it wouldn't have travelled this far without Kashyap sticking his name on the credits; such is the way the industry still operates.) Yet you can see Songs of Forgotten Trees growing before your eyes: we're watching and living with Mumbaikars we know here - or people we feel we know almost intimately by the time cinema protocol requires us to move out.

Songs of Forgotten Trees opens in selected cinemas from Friday.