Shape of Momo

Shape of Momo is a poignant semi-autobiographical drama set in the hills of Sikkim that quietly examines patriarchy, migration, and the painful process of outgrowing a home you still deeply love. Through a metaphorical title, the film explores how women are constantly “shaped” by societal expectations and inherited conditioning. At its centre is Bishnu, a 32-year-old woman who resists conformity in subtle yet powerful ways. Her quiet rebellion becomes the emotional core of the story. The narrative follows four women across three generations of a male-less household, each negotiating a society that views such a family as vulnerable, unsafe, and incomplete. Bishnu’s mother survives through caution and strategy, her sister embraces the conventional route of marriage and motherhood, while the grandmother clings to pride in her sons — one deceased, the other living abroad in Dubai, forever postponing his promise to take her with him. In the absence of a male figure, the women endure prejudice, threats to their safety, and constant undermining by workers and tenants at their orange orchard. Ironically, the film highlights how society conditions women to believe they need the presence of men for protection often from men themselves.

We often believe that Northeastern society enjoys far greater gender parity than the Hindi heartland. Yet, watching Shape of Momo, we realise that while the shape of patriarchy may vary, its taste remains exactly the same. Here, the humble dumpling becomes a brilliant, tactile metaphor for the rigid social architectures women are forced to inhabit. Between the geometry of conformity and imperfection as resistance lies a tender coming-of-age story worth savouring. Often, the luminescence of cinema lies not in loud rebellions but in the mapping of invisible boundaries. Tribeny Rai’s debut feature delivers a gentle, sharp-witted exploration of autonomy, inheritance, and the friction of modern ideals against ancestral soil. Along the way, the film effectively dismantles romanticised views of Himalayan communities, highlighting economic disparities, migrant labour issues, and gender expectations in a cultural context.

Under its deceptively calm surface, there’s a lot going on in Tribeny Rai’s assured debut Shape of Momo. Based on Rai’s own experiences, the film assimilates several themes– the search for self, the definition of home, gender roles, family ties– in a film which has the courage to back a lead character who refuses to confirm, or to be likeable. While the other themes are familiar, the creation of Bishnu– stubborn and soft at the same time– breaks free from the good-girl trap that most female characters find themselves confined in, in our mainstream cinema. Only recently have we had characters (Varsha Bharath’s ‘Bad Girl’) that have broken free, and in turn, allowed the films to chart unexplored territories.

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation, scoffs Virginia Woolf in her fiercely feminist 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own. Her sarcasm over patriarchy’s need to confine women in roles decided by men carves 32-year-old Bishnu’s (Gaumaya Gurung) rebellion in director Tribeny Rai’s superbly sublime Shape of Momo. A frame of Woolf’s essay, flanked by a picture of poets Rabindranath Tagore and Bishnu Kumari Waiba aka Parijat – the Nepali writer she shares her name with – adorning the walls of Bishnu’s childhood bedroom in her Sikkim home are telling of the liberal literature she fed on before escaping to Delhi in search of greener pastures.

Most homecoming stories have a narrative pattern. Especially the feel-good ones. The central character returns to their village from the big city. But the perspective is new. Suddenly everything feels regressive. There are problems and prejudices. The locals sound smaller, and the enlightened protagonist operates from a higher moral ground. Social change is inevitable; the hero simply knows better. Either they leave as the bigger person or stay to fix it all. It’s the urban-saviour syndrome refitted into a back-to-roots template.

There is a certain kind of homecoming story Indian cinema has told so many times that it has become its own grammar. Someone leaves their village for greener pastures. They survive the city and then return changed, sharper, more knowing. The village is the past; they are the future. Tribeny Rai’s stirring Nepali-language debut feature, Shape of Momo, begins as if it is that story and then methodically dismantles it. The film, set to release in theatres on May 29, opens with Bishnu (Gaumaya Gurung), freshly back in her village in rural Sikkim after quitting her job in Delhi, reading out a piece of advertisement copy she has written to a room full of relatives and elders. And then, in the same breath, the conversation turns to which of the few men still living in the village might make a suitable husband for her. Her face simply shuts. That small moment is the film’s thesis: that no amount of distance, education or financial independence fully immunises a woman from the place she comes from, because the place is not just geography. It is an expectation handed down for so long that it has started to look like inheritance.