Cannes award-winner breaks one of screenwriting’s biggest rules – and it works

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT ★★★★

(M) 118 minutes

Much of the action in this Cannes Grand Prix winner is set in Mumbai. It opens at the city’s central station among the surging crowds at morning peak hour, which is terrifying, especially if you’ve been there. But the camera keeps its cool, scanning the faces of the commuters as their voices form the narration, catching the pounding pulse of the city with vignettes from their daily lives.

We finally settle on Prabha (Kani Kusruti), who is en route to her job as a nurse in the maternity ward of a busy hospital, and a single close-up serves as a remarkably eloquent introduction. She has a grave, knowing look that speaks of illusions abandoned and compromises made about the direction in which the passing years are taking her.

At the hospital, we watch as she deals calmly and kindly with a difficulty patient and offers to help her friend, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a cleaner, who’s being forced out of her home by a big development company. And at the end of the day, we go home with her to the tiny flat she shares with Anu (Divya Prabha), a younger and more outgoing nurse whose not-so-secret affair with a Muslim boy is shaping up as one of the film’s main themes.

Writer-director Payal Kapadia is a documentary maker. This is her first work of fiction and it reflects her fondness for weaving a link between the personal and the political. She doesn’t press home the point. Her characters don’t have the taint of case studies, worth considering only because of what they tell us about modern India. She’s giving us intimate tales about women she clearly regards with great affection. But she doesn’t crowd them. The story unfolds in a cinéma vérité style that invites us to pick up clues as we go.

When a rice cooker is delivered to Prabha’s apartment with no note, we learn she has a husband working in Germany. She has not heard from him for a year or more and, at first, she ignores the gift. It’s only later when she opens the package again, hugging it to her, that we get a hint as to how much she cares about his disappearance from her life.

Nor do she and Anu talk about the Muslim boy. She finds out about the romance only when another nurse tells her it’s become the talk of the hospital.

And we’re well into the film when Kapadia delivers her biggest surprise, breaking one of conventional screenwriting’s cardinal rules by switching the setting and essentially dividing the film into two halves. What’s more, it works. We’re taken out of the city that has done so much to dictate the shape and pace of the action and transported to the country’s south. Parvaty has surrendered to the developers and decided to go back to the fishing village where she grew up, and Prabha and Anu are going with her to help her settle in.

Initially, Parvaty’s move represents a defeat. Nobody who goes to Mumbai seeking a better life wants to return to square one. But after a while, the wide horizon and the beauty of the sea and the surrounding forest begin to take effect. The women relax, the strictures of city life fall away and new possibilities present themselves.

This doesn’t mean that binding decisions are made, or happy endings are assured. But there is one certainty. The three have come to trust one another and never again will they feel quite as lonely as they were at the start.

All We Imagine as Light is released in cinemas on December 26.

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