To my fellow summer weary, too sweaty, beach-skeptical readers out there: We made it. We’ve officially crossed the threshold into fall, and it feels great. Summer’s brash extroversion is finally at an end and I’m very much looking forward to putting on a light jacket, guzzling so much cider that my doctor makes a note in my chart, and gathering inside with friends.
The earlier sunsets, chilled air, and approaching end of the year invite introspection, and I’ve got two reflective recommendations—a short film and a novella—both about being inside with a small, temporary community and the sincerity that’s possible when we share creativity.
Usually when someone sings at a bar, it’s extremely annoying. But this isn’t the case in the gorgeous short film The Singers, which tied for the best live action short Oscar last year (one of only seven ties in Academy history). The film, a touching adaptation of an 1852 Turgenev short story of the same name, features an unconventional cast directed by a seasoned documentarian.
The plot is pretty simple: a bartender at a quiet, locals-only bar offers $100 and free drinks to the bar’s best singer. The competition becomes a tender and funny musical showcase, with each character getting a revealing moment in the spotlight. I won’t spoil it, but there are some genuinely jaw-dropping performances that culminate in a wonderful button—I got to see this live and there was a huge laugh as the credits rolled.
Director Sam Davis wanted to make “a love letter to the underdog,” and cast amateur singers that his team found on social media. These are undiscovered talents who have gone viral once or twice, or had a shot on some reality singing show. Drawing on his background in documentary film, Davis worked without a traditional script, allowing the cast to improvise and bring themselves to their roles. One of the actors kept trying to sneak beers on set, which became part of the film. Another shared that he lost his wife—this too became part of the film.
All the performances were recorded in the bar and shot on 35 mm—it’s a warm and intimate film. I was very moved by the way the masculine urge to turn singing into a bar competition, yields to something tender. What space opens up when we’re willing to share something vulnerable?
Like Turgenev’s story, the film is a container for different characters, allowing the audience to draw their own constellations between the story’s points. There’s a similar dynamic in Buddhadeva Bose’s 1951 novella My Kind of Girl, a series of stories about youth and ill-fated love from four delayed travelers.
The men are a Chaucerian cross section—a contractor, a bureaucrat, a writer, and a doctor—brought together on a cold night in a train station’s waiting room. A young couple passes them by, inspiring the men to trade memories of early romance.
The novella was written in a moment when much was changing in India. Bose published My Kind of Girl in 1951, soon after Partition and a year after the Indian Constitution went into effect. But the past the men are recalling in their stories would have been in the ’20s or ’30s, when the British were still colonizing the region, resistance was gaining strength, and cultural mores were shifting in India and around the globe.
There’s an aspect of insecure masculinity—also present in the Turgenev and Davis Singers—as these men find themselves in the unknowns of a national transition. Bose formally dramatizes what this must have felt like: here are middle class professionals waiting for a modern engine to take them forward.
But the stories of love are the heart of the book, and each is a protracted sigh full of longing. As one of the men asks: “Is the memory of happiness that has passed, happy or sad?” The answer seems to be both. These aren’t meet-cutes. The four romances are bittersweet, about love that is marked by melancholy, ends too soon, or never got a chance to begin.
There is always a warmth to the stories, the unmistakable blush of first love. And the sharing affects both the teller and the audience—my favorite moments of the book are when Bose brings us back to the waiting room after a story concludes, as the men sit together, the story lingering around them like the smoke of an extinguished cigarette.
There is always a moment of small grief: facing the unrealized potential of a connection that never formed, because each of these men never knew the person they pined for, not truly: “The girl of our dreams, who lives in our heart, [he] wanted to see her for one time as a real person—that is all that is real, all that matters, nothing else does.”
It’s a relatable regret, a recognizable part of reckoning with time that has passed. The feeling that anything was possible reaches the cold, granite reality of an ending, as final as summer becomes fall.
Images from IMDB and Archipelago Books
