Ram’s just not that into you.

Sita Sings the Blues (2008) is an animated retelling of selected portions of the Ramayana, interspersed with an apparently autobiographical account of the collapse of a contemporary marriage, all set to the music of 1920’s Jazz singer Annette Hanshaw. Naturally, I had to see it.

Nina (writer/director/animator/lots of other things Nina Paley) and Dave (Sanjiv Jhaveri) live in San Francisco with their cat. The couple are cheerful, cuddly, and apparently happy. And then Dave gets a new job - in India! he’s supposed to be gone for six months, but after a month of no contact, he calls Nina with the wonderful news that the jon has been extended for another year. Dave can’t figure out why Nina finds this upsetting, but finally suggests that she join him in India.

Meanwhile, three shadow puppets (Aseem Chhabra, Bhavana Nagulapally, and Manish Acharya) recount a version of the Ramayana. The story they tell is very abbreviated (Lakshman, for instance, is barely mentioned) and focused mostly on Sita herself, but it hits all the major story points; Ram (Debargo Sanyal) is exiled. Sita (Reena Shah) chooses to follow him. Ravanna (Sanjiv Jhaveri again), bewitched by assorted lotus related similes, falls in love with Sita and abducts her. Hanuman (Aladdin Ullah) is awesome. And there’s a big battle. And then an intermission.

After leading an army of monkeys and conquering a city in order to rescue his wife, Ram coldly dismisses her; she’s been living in another man’s house for years at this point, and he can no longer be sure of her purity. After Sita survives a literal trial by fire and the gods themselves manifest to personally testify of her purity, Ram is forced to concede that yeah, she’s pretty pure. Even so, a little gossip among the peasants is enough reason for him to send his heavily pregnant wife into exile.

Nina’s life isn’t a bed of lotuses, either. She arrives in India to find Dave oddly cold. While she’s in New York for a business meeting, Dave sends her an email telling her not to come back. Nina collapses, she cries, and then she takes a copy of the Ramayana off the shelf and begins to read.

The animation in Sita Sings the Blues is very good. There are at least six different animation styles showcased here; Nina and Dave’s scenes are drawn in a simple, contemporary style that would be right at home on a newspaper’s comics page. The shadow puppets are, well, shadow puppets. Ram and Sita are presented with brightly colored devotional art during the puppets’ explanations, a more classical Indian style during the dialogue, and a very stylized, hyper cute style during Sita’s songs. After the breakups, the film suddenly slips into psychedelic rotoscoping reminiscent of the “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” sequence in Yellow Submarine. Visually, this movie is amazing.

The sound is also pretty amazing. I had not heard of Annette Handshaw before, but she was very good at singing, while the puppet commentary and the Ram/Sita dialogue is very funny, and occasionally very pointed.

If the film has a weakness, it’s that Nina’s plot line is relatively undeveloped. We see that she’s very hurt; the scene where she is lying on the bed doing her best to project sexy rays at Dave, who promptly rolls over and goes to sleep, is heartbreaking. But Dave is such a cipher that it’s hard to understand why. We see enough of Ram being dutiful and magnificent that we understand what Sita sees in him, and we know his reasons for rejecting her. (Granted, they’re not great reasons, but we know what they are.) All we know about Dave is that he’s apparently a great kisser and dumped his wife with no explanation. Still, it’s not the first time that a metaphor has eclipsed its subject.