The director is on her second film mumbaikar Payal Kapadia signs with All We Imagine as Light her first fiction film, chronicling the desires, frustrations and possible twists in the lives of three women of different ages in the megalopolis of Maharashtra. A very soft, sweet, engaging style, strengthened by a look that is anything but banal. In competition at Cannes 2024.
Prabha, Anu, and the other girls in the bunch
In Mumbai, Prabha’s daily life is turned upside down when she receives an unexpected gift from her husband who has gone to live abroad. Her young roommate, Anu, tries in vain to find a place in the city to have sex with her boyfriend. A trip to a coastal village offers the two women a space where their desires can finally manifest. [sinossi]
Near the bluest sea (to quote a masterpiece by Boris Barnet) Prabha and Anu’s wishes can perhaps finally come true. Close to the bluest sea and far from the oppressive cloud of Mumbai, a megalopolis where a downpour can have such an impact as to prevent a wedding, and force a sudden return home; an often nocturnal megalopolis, in All We Imagine as Lightand in constant motion. A movement of people, given that they come to the gigantic city from practically every village in India, but also a political one. A landslide, a bradyseism that crushes the last down, as it has always been everywhere and even more so in a nation divided into castes. Payal Kapadia, who for the first time tackles a work of fiction but in 2021 brought her documentary debut to the Croisette – at the Directors’ Fortnight A Night of Knowing Nothing, possesses a profound poetic and lyrical vein, but knows how to remain anchored to reality and not get lost behind flights of fancy. Her cinema is profoundly political and aware of the need for a gaze that is not volatile, superficial, but that knows how to dig deep by investigating the real that swirls around. So if in his first feature film he put the protests of his students in the cinema course he holds at the center of the discussion, here he imagines Mumbai as the natural theater in which one can witness all the dystonias of Indian society, without exception. There are those who move from job to job without ever finding stability, those who in a trade union manner try to resist – without success – the disposal of an impressive number of jobs, those who discover that they cannot claim any rights over the apartment in which they have lived for over twenty years because there has never actually been anything written, those who prefer to return to live in their town of origin, perhaps abandoning a profession to reinvent themselves in a completely different role. And then there are the constraints of a cosmopolitan society but anchored to traditions, sometimes even in an obtuse way. Kapadia never places a judgmental emphasis on what she is filming, but nevertheless makes sure that these details are clearly perceptible, and act almost as a glue for the story she intends to tell.
In the center of All We Imagine as Light there are three women: Prabha is a nurse, Anu is her apprentice, and Parvaty is one of the cooks at the hospital where they work. The first two also live together, because Anu is Prabha’s roommate, whose husband went to live in Germany years before and no longer gives any sign of himself. One day, however, a delivery man delivers a cooking appliance to Prabha’s apartment, which comes from the Teutonic lands, and this sends the woman into crisis, not so much with respect to the concept of marriage but with her very existence, with the way in which she leads it. , to what perhaps he should or could have claimed. Better: desire. The director – which is her own – is aware of the political value of this verb mumbaikaras they would say in India, that is to say a citizen of Mumbai, and therefore tells a context that he knows very well – he places it in the middle of the journey of the film’s life, and it is the triggering element that will produce the turning point of the second part, when All We Imagine as Light will have to move towards the conclusion. Prabha has forgotten since time immemorial how and why she “desires” herself, so much so that she doesn’t even know how to respond to the offer of love from a doctor with whom she is clearly in love (she had a reaction of pure jealousy when Anu allowed herself to flirt without any malice with the man) replying with “I’m married” which, although it is true, is not a statement sincere; Anu desires the boy she is seeing, who is Muslim – but they both give very little weight to their traditions of origin – and with whom perhaps she could even imagine herself with in the future; Parvaty wishes, now that the fight with her companions is lost, only to return to his town near the sea, where “at least I have my own home”.
But the desires that suffocate in the city, like everything else, transform into reality, a little real, a little dreamlike, close to the undertow. And it is here, in this place-non-place, that Kapadia’s tactile ability to observe the world and human beings explodes in all its power, reaching truly surprising heights of meaning and poetry (the sequence in which Prabha speaks with a man who saved from drowning, the adventure in the cave of Anu and her boyfriend) and demonstrating how cinema is still today the privileged artistic tool for investigating the human, its stratified complexity, its contradictions and those of the societies that he built. It had been since 1994, when it appeared on the Croisette Swaham by Shaji N. Karun, that India did not take part in the Cannes Film Festival competition: an important (and deserved) return for a cinematography that is fundamental yet difficult to “manage” for the Western festival microcosm, with the certainty that Kapadia will be one names to take into greater consideration in the years to come.
 by Kapadia – Review){kind=link}