Grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival this year, “All we imagine as light” by Payal Kapadia was the first Indian film to be in competition there in thirty years. It is a marvel of sensitivity, of an enveloping formal beauty, which paints a contrasting and empathetic portrait of the condition of women in modern India. A very great film.
We could wonder for a long time about the absence for three decades in official competition at Cannes, the largest film festival in the world, of India, yet more than a major cinema country, a continent country. But we prefer to rejoice in its victorious return with a Grand Prix for a film with the title, also great: All we imagine as light. “Everything we imagine to be light”. What a wonderful promise of hope, and a perfect definition of cinema!
Noticed at the Directors’ Fortnight in 2021 with All a Night Without Knowing, a documentary film which was as much a personal diary as a poetic-political gesture, Payal Kapadia opens her fiction with a polyphonic immersion in the nightlife of Bombay. On images of nocturnal activities, markets, construction sites, public transport, there are anonymous testimonies of the difficulty of being and living in the permanent tornado of the megalopolis. Soon the camera focuses on three women, three nurses, three ages.
Three women, three solitudes
There is Prabah, not yet 40 years old, very reserved, married, who has not heard from her husband who has gone to work in Germany for more than a year. But she waits for him, remains deaf to the attention paid to her by a doctor who has recently arrived and is barely less shy. Prabah shares an apartment with her colleague, Anu, who is younger and more sassy. She has a Muslim boyfriend, which is frowned upon but she doesn’t care, her worry is that they have nowhere to go to be peaceful and go beyond kissing and caresses that they exchange on the sly. And finally, there is Parvaty. Older, left without papers by an improvident late husband, she risks being evicted from her coveted accommodation by Bombay developers hungry for land. Prabah helps him in his efforts but it is difficult.
“They say that Bombay is the city of all possibilities, but above all it is the city of illusions”sighs Prabah in one of the many voice-overs, interior voices, which make up the film, especially in its first urban part. In a second part, the three women will indeed find themselves far from the city, and perhaps everything…
If All we imagine as light is not worked by a major narrative issue, it shows attention to this detail called the human which does not fail to move in its staging full of delicacy and sensuality of sorority, but also full of tender irony towards men. He also dazzles with the finesse of the intelligence with which, casually, he tells us through fiction the contrasting, complicated reality of his country and continent. And then, what beauty! What light! What a finale! In short, a Grand Prix and a VERY great film.
