13/35
In Mumbai, nurse Prabha’s routine is upended when she receives an unexpected gift from her estranged husband. Her younger roommate, Anu, tries in vain to find a place in the city where she can be intimate with her boyfriend… Director Payal Kapadia and the cast of All We Imagine As Light come together to share the most heartwarming reactions from Cannes and much more. !. The first Indian film to win the prestigious Grand Prix at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. This film dramatizes the many challenges faced by single women living in Mumbai and highlights their resilience. All the women are nurses in the same hospital, but that’s where the similarities end, as each has their own set of problems and, one might say, solutions. Desire, fear, regret and stale patience are the emotions that keep alternating as the story quietly unfolds. Perhaps the biggest 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 where people have room to be unusually honest and unguarded with each other, even when they’re lying or posing. The acting is uniformly excellent and rises to the level of the writing – there are no false notes here, although there are a few irritating quiet intensity of the characters’ interactions. The detachment is heightened at several points where the film seems to have documentary elements or certainly creates that kind of feeling. I wasn’t always crazy about the music and how it was evoked, but this is a minor quibble that many may not. I take issue with another reviewer’s claim that this film was conceived as “awards bait.” In my opinion, there is too much heart and sincerity in this film to be categorized as cynical or manipulative—certainly no more than any other film that tries to tell an important story in a compelling and beautiful way. And this film carries many risks that I can’t imagine overcoming in an increasingly sectarian and puritanical India. I highly recommend “All We Imagine as Light.”