There is a shimmery quality to Siddharth Menon’s A Little Bit of Glitter, a short about how our community can reveal the most confident sides of each other. Even if we don’t know it. It’s a kind and generous film about how we allow society’s rules dictate our daily lives when we should be forging our own path.
Sushama Deshpande’s Vidya keeps her head down as her brother, Rakesh, speaks his mind. He tells his daughter, Natasha, that he doesn’t like the streaks of color she put in her hair, and assures his sister that he will drop documents off at her house so she remembers to pay her council tax. In the opening scene, she begins saying that she has been thinking about the spare room in her house. Her voice is nervous–almost scared. Has Vidya always been tentative to speak?
In her own home, you can feel Vidya’s sadness. Now that her husband has passed, she decides to rent her spare room out, and the first person to answer her ad is the honest, boistrous Nick, a young, gay man who shows genuine interest in his new landlady. When they share an interest in makeup, the spark is lit. Nick wants to do his face for the upcoming Pride celebrations, especially after seeing how Vidya does her eyeliner. Doing someone else’s makeup (and I don’t speak from experience) is intimate. You are sitting close to another person, inches from their face, while you create something on a living canvas. That might sound naive to some, but adorning someone else’s eys or lips can create a bond more palpable than people on the outside realize.
Glitter is hopeful and alive, and its screenplay carries a curiosity about learning from another age in a time when we should be learning from each other’s experiences more than ever. It would make a wonderful companion to Lee Knight’s A Friend of Dorothy.
Your life doesn’t end because of tragedy or someone telling you that you cannot live your life a certain way. I like to think of Vidya and Nick having a long, cheeky relationship. They deserve that.
A Little Bit of Glitter is playing virtually through October 12 on Out On Film’s programming.
