A Monsoon Date

A Monsoon Date has Konkona Sen Sharma playing a trans woman who is looking to find a boyfriend via the conventional dating game. In this short film, she's on her way to rendezvous at a coffee shop with a guy she's been dating for the past month (it's their month-anniversary). On this date, she is going to tell him she was born a boy. It's a rainy day and she's in a share taxi. Just to put our protagonist's issues in perspective, we are given glimpses of the lives of the driver and the people she shares the taxi with. There's also a "hijra" trans (as opposed to Konkana's upper class trans) who comes up at a traffic signal. This film's flaw, and it is a big flaw, is that Konkana looks totally unconvincing as a trans woman. She looks nothing like the boy she's shown to have been in flashbacks. At the Kashish Queer Film Festival in Mumbai, director Tanuja Chandra said she has always wanted to work with Konkana Sen Sharma and it finally happened in this film. A case of too much admiration leading to miscasting perhaps.

Konkana Sen Sharma is beautiful in this 20-odd minute short film. Her acting, her expressions, and sometimes lack of it beautifully sum up the character who's happier now but finds herself out of place, rejected and alone. Gazal Dhaliwal writes a story that cuts deep but the direction, to my untrained arm-chair critic eye, left a bit wanting. All that relative to what you expect from a slow-paced art movie that's romantically set in monsoons. You get my point. But that said, acting and the issue it champions make up for it. Go watch!