24/42
In Mumbai, nurse Prabha’s routine is thrown into disarray when she receives an unexpected gift from her ex-husband. Her younger roommate, Anu, tries in vain to find a place in the city to get intimate with her boyfriend. Director Payal Kapadia and the cast of All We Imagine As Light reunite to share the most touching reactions from Cannes and much more!. First Indian film to receive the prestigious Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024. This film dramatises many of the challenges faced by single women living in Bombay and underlines their resilience. All the women here are nurses at the same hospital, but that’s where the similarity ends, as each has her own particular set of problems and, one might say, solutions. Desire, fear, regret and stolid patience are the emotions that continually alternate as the story quietly unfolds. Probably the greatest asset is the script, which offers unusually rich and thoughtful dialogue between the characters. The amount of action in the plot seems enough to provide a scaffolding for conversations in which people have room to be extraordinarily honest and unconcerned with each other, even when lying or posturing. The acting is uniformly excellent and rises to the level of the writing: there are no false notes, though there are some tantalizingly quiet loose ends in the intensity of the characters’ interactions. The detachment is amplified at several points where the film seems to incorporate documentary elements or certainly creates that kind of feeling. I wasn’t always thrilled with the music and how it was invoked, but this is a minor quibble that many might not share. I dispute another reviewer’s claim that this film was intended as “awards bait.” In my opinion, there is too much heart and honesty in this film to be categorized as cynical or manipulative, certainly no more so than any other film that seeks to tell an important story in a beautiful and compelling way. And this film takes a lot of risks that I can’t imagine would be welcomed in an increasingly sectarian and puritanical India. I highly recommend “Everything We Imagine as Light.”
