Leela

The sound of waves by the sea doesn’t hint at any horizon or incoming journey. On the contrary, the rocky shore is holed with small, isolated bodies of water – there’s nowhere to go. A young woman wanders around: her reflection in the water is a blur. That’s how Leela sets the limited world of Ila and Amala, two female friends living in a small village in Goa, India. They keep musing on the mysterious disappearance of Leela. Is she dead? Did she manage to flee to the big city?

As in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) or Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) before, Leela is an absence, a ghost and a mystery. She’s also the starting point to explore the dynamics of a friendship between two alienated characters in a patriarchal world. Through beautiful compositions, director Chowdhary suggests a world as a delicate bubble about to burst – because of violence, because of the girls who are tempted to flee.