10/42
In Mumbai, nurse Prabha’s routine is disrupted when she receives an unexpected gift from her estranged husband. Her younger roommate, Anu, struggles 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 touching reactions from Cannes and 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 Bombay and highlights their resilience. All the women here are nurses in the same hospital, but that’s where the similarities end as each has her own unique set of problems and, one might say, solutions. Desire, fear, regret and dull patience are the emotions that alternate constantly as the story quietly unfolds. Perhaps the film’s greatest asset is the screenplay, which offers unusually rich and thoughtful dialogues between the characters. The amount of action in the plot seems sufficient 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 faking. The acting is uniformly excellent and rises to the level of the writing — there are no false notes, though there is an inviting quiet intensity to the characters’ interactions. The detachment is heightened at several points where the film seems to incorporate documentary elements, or certainly creates a sense of one. I wasn’t always crazy about the music and the way it’s invoked, but this is a minor gripe that many may not share. I take issue with another reviewer’s claim that this film is intended as "awards bait". In my opinion, there’s too much heart and sincerity in this film to be categorized as cynical or manipulative — certainly no more than any other film that seeks to tell an important story in a compelling and beautiful way. And this film takes a lot of risks that I can’t imagine will fare well in an increasingly sectarian and puritanical India. I highly recommend "All We Imagine as Light"