23/26
In Mumbai, nurse Prabha’s routine is turned upside down when she receives an unexpected gift from her estranged husband. Her younger roommate, Anu, tries in vain to find a place in the city to be intimate with her boyfriend. Director Payal Kapadia and the cast of All We Imagine As Light join together to share their most touching reactions from Cannes and more!. The first Indian film to receive the prestigious Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024.. This film dramatizes many of the challenges faced by single women living in Bombay and highlights their resilience. All the women here are nurses in the same hospital, but there the similarity ends as each has her own particular set of problems and, one might say, solutions. Longing, fear, regret and stolid patience are the emotions that continually alternate as the story silently unfolds. Perhaps the greatest asset is the screenplay, which offers unusually rich and thoughtful dialogues between the characters. The amount of action in the plot seems just enough to provide a scaffolding for conversations in which people have room to be unusually honest and unguarded with each other, even when they’re lying or posturing. The acting is uniformly excellent and rises to the level of the writing: there are no false notes, although there are some tantalizing loose threads. The cinematography and editing are also quite good at creating a thoughtful and somewhat detached atmosphere, which complements the quiet 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 haven’t always been crazy about the music and how it was evoked, but that’s a minor quibble that many might not share. I take issue with another reviewer’s assertion that this film was conceived as “awards bait.” In my opinion, there is too much heart and honesty in this film for it to be classified 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 takes a lot of risks that I can’t imagine handling well in an increasingly sectarian and puritanical India. I highly recommend “All We Imagine as Light.”
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