Payal Kapadia’s Shifting Mumbai Drama

Again in 2021, Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia got here to Cannes together with her first feature-length work, A Evening of Realizing Nothing, which went on to win the competition’s Golden Eye prize for Greatest Documentary. The label is considerably deceiving: Composed as a found-footage film about love, loss and movie college students engulfed in protests in opposition to Narendra Modi’s authorities, the film performed much less like a documentary than a fictional collage of documentary parts, carving a tragic story out of bits and items of actual life.

Kapadia’s shifting second function, All We Think about as Gentle, begins off in the same vein. The digicam glides by means of the streets of Mumbai at night time, passing by means of out of doors markets illuminated by fluorescent lights, like tiny cities unto themselves. On the soundtrack we hear folks speaking about their experiences in India’s largest metropolis: “I all the time have the sensation that I’m going to depart,” one individual says. Then in some unspecified time in the future we deal with a girl commuting house by practice, and the story begins.

That girl is Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a nurse who works lengthy hours in one of many metropolis’s many hospitals and finishes her duties method after darkish. She’s clearly no pushover and does her job nicely, taking cost of different nurses within the obstetrics ward and dealing effectively with sufferers — together with, at one level, a 24-year-old mom of three kids who needs her husband to get a vasectomy, for which the Indian authorities affords a small monetary reward.

These early sequences have a documentary taste to them as nicely, however they’re nonetheless telling — particularly once we understand that in contrast to a lot of the sufferers she treats, Prabha could be very a lot a girl on her personal. She does, actually, have a husband, however he’s been working in Germany for years they usually hardly communicate anymore. And he or she additionally has a roommate, Anu (Divya Prabha), a energetic woman employed on the similar hospital who’s been relationship a younger Muslim man, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon) — a undeniable fact that she retains hidden from Prabha and the opposite nurses.

Because the fictional aspect regularly takes over, we comply with Prabha and Anu whereas they drift between work, their routines afterward and their lengthy commutes to their condo, in a day by day and nightly grind backed by Dhritiman Das’ jazzy piano rating. That music completely encapsulates the tone Kapadia goes for: one thing melancholic but in addition slightly playful, in a movie that’s in the end extra of a romantic dramedy than a pure drama. There’s loads of unhappiness right here, but in addition a number of humor and feminine camaraderie.

Prabha and Anu appear to have a lot in frequent, resembling the truth that they each hail from the Indian state of Kerala and communicate Malayalam (within the hospital the medical doctors communicate Hindi). Like so many different folks, they’ve come to Mumbai to start out a brand new life, and All We Think about as Gentle remembers sure movies by Satyajit Ray, resembling The World of Apu and The Large Metropolis, by which small-town people quit part of themselves as they shift to city dwelling.

However the two ladies additionally sit on reverse ends of the romantic spectrum: Anu is within the midst of a passionate love story that’s hampered by the truth that Shiaz is Muslim and he or she’s Hindu. The couple has nowhere to go to be alone, which implies they spend a number of time making out in public. In a single telling and slightly amusing sequence, Anu goes to purchase a burka in order that she will sneak into Shiaz’s condo, solely to study that his household has come house early.

Prabha, in the meantime, tries to stay devoted to her faraway husband, keeping off the advances of a health care provider who’s clearly smitten together with her. In some unspecified time in the future a bundle arrives from Germany: It’s a state-of-the-art strain cooker, despatched by her partner as a present. As unromantic as that sounds, Prabha nonetheless wanders into the kitchen one night time and wraps her legs across the machine, in a heartbreaking try to seek out some intimacy.

All We Think about as Gentle is about so far as you may get from the stylistics of Bollywood’s masala musicals, even when there may be one quick and memorable impromptu dance scene towards the top. And but its story of ladies in search of love and happiness in a calamitous world brings to thoughts these fashionable Mumbai-set motion pictures, by which heroines undergo loads of heartbreak earlier than issues finally work out.

This occurs, in a way, throughout the movie’s third act, when Prabha and Anu accompany an older colleague, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), on her journey again to the seaside village the place she grew up — and the place she’s been compelled to maneuver after life has turn out to be unaffordable, even for a girl like her with a gentle job.

The transition from metropolis to nation permits the three pals to breathe freely once more: They drink and dance and open up to each other in methods they may by no means do again in Mumbai. Each Prabha and Anu additionally handle to find issues about themselves and their love lives — whether or not it’s Prabha coming to phrases together with her marriage or Anu consummating her ardour for Shiaz. The latter sequence is shockingly sensual and appears to interrupt just a few taboos, displaying a Hindu girl and Muslim man making love at a time when India’s prime minister appears to be doing all he can to ignite tensions between the 2 religions.

Kapadia and DP Ranabir Das seize these closing sequences with the identical elegantly grainy look they apply to the remainder of the movie, though one thing non secular and barely phantasmagoric creeps into the narrative on the finish. It’s as if fleeing the town has allowed the ladies to succeed in a better state of being — the “mild” described within the film’s poetic title transforms from the tough neons of Mumbai’s streets at night time to the calm mild of the setting solar, the place the buddies can lastly discover some peace.