THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – SHOULD NOT BE LOST
Sometimes a film is a color. Like a scenic signature, like an abstraction that does not need words. In Everything we imagine as lightsecond feature film by Payal Kapadia, cyan blue and magenta red paint a halftone portrait of a city of lights, Bombay, commercial capital of India and beating heart of “Bollywood”. Immigrants go there every day, less to dream than to escape family trauma. Some voiceovers in the documentary make it clear to us from the beginning of the story.
We discover Payal Kapadia’s fashionable cinema in Cannes, in 2021, at the Filmmakers’ Fortnight: All night without knowing He wove a loving and militant correspondence, mixing a multitude of images filmed by young people fighting against the Hindu ultranationalist power of Narendra Modi.
Everything we imagine as light It is only apparently more peaceful: we must salute the grace with which the director films the metropolis as a falsely enchanted merry-go-round, revealing her heroines in the middle of a crowd of anonymous people. The film begins before dawn, inhaling the city as it dawns early. The camera moves over the stalls of a wholesale market, with its vendors lurking in the shadows, at the foot of the buildings that still sleep.
“The monsoon and the non-monsoon”
In the distance, a horizontal strip of lights marks the passage of the train, a kind of aerial subway. On board, a woman in a blue sari stands, holding onto the bar as if she were spinning on a carousel. We find her at the hospital where she works as a nurse. Her name is Prabha (Kani Kusruti), she lives in a room with Anu (Divya Prabha), who we find a few floors below, in the ticket office, spinning around in her chair to avoid getting bored. The stethoscope is your love horoscope: the nurse on duty uses it to listen to your heartbeat.
When will Anu find Shiaz, her Muslim lover whom her parents will never accept? To a 24-year-old patient who already has three children and doesn’t want any more, the young nurse stealthily hands her a package of birth control pills. And he adds that the State offers a bucket and 1,000 rupees (!), or about ten euros, to men who undergo a vasectomy, a surgical operation that makes them sterile. The third protagonist, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), is the cook of the same hospital. The old building he lives in is threatened with destruction.
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