All we Imagine as Light * * *

Wake me up for the second half

Well, this certainly isn't the first time this has happened to me.  The darling of the major critics and a big time award winner left me quite underwhelemed.

All We Imagine As Light is the film that won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and as far as I can tell hasn't receieved a bad review.  I won't give it one either, but I sure won't give it a five star one.  No film this wearying deserves that kind of praise.  To be honest I found it boring - and I'm the kind of guy who really likes methodical low pulse drama.

 Director Payal Kapadia is an experienced documentary film maker and her hand-held, fly-on-the-wall style of directing is quite prevalent in this film. Also prevalent - and irritating - is the deliberate underexposure. It's irritatingly dark! At least, it was at the showing I went to.

Kapadia has written a story about three women who work at the same hospital.  They are friends.  Two of them live together, the third is just about to become homeless.  We learn that  one has a husband who lives in Germany and hasn't communicated for over a year, whilst another is having a secret relationship with a Muslim boyfriend, which is not  likely to get the stamp of approval from her Hindi friends and family.  The first half is a bit of an insight into life in Mumbai: the heat, the rain, the congestion, the noise. 

Anyway, the soon to be homeless lass decides life might be better in the village where she came from, so in the second half of the film they all go the seaside village to help her settle in and that is where things very much take a turn for the better as mystery and intrigue is introduced with a boyfriend that shouldn't be there and a man rescued from drowning.

It's an okay story that shines at times but like Moonlight and Nomadland it left me wondering what all the praise was about other than the film industry playng the woke card again.