All cities are crossroads, transitory beacons of artificial light which attract visitors and those who stay forever but who will always remain visitors. Mumbai is its own special case; something that Payal Kapadia eloquently pleads in the first Indian film to play in Cannes Competition in three decades. It’s a light for audiences to surrender to, a realist-infused story of three women broadly representing three generations in a city where their hold is fragile, where their breaths barely leave a mist of a trace.
This fiction debut from a talented documentarian brings to mind the work of Lucrecia Martel or Alice Rohrwacher, yet there’s a strong romantic streak that also calls to mind Wong Kar-wai’s great love affair with the city of Hong Kong. Mumbai lives and breathes here too – the monsoon rains pour tears into a place ‘that isn’t real..
.[where] you could vanish into thin air” – and when the film’s protagonists leave the city for what is intended to be a quick trip to a beach-side village, it weighs on their actions: their sense of fate, agency, and, ultimately, freedom. Mumbai-based Kapadia won the Golden Eye for best documentary at Cannes in 2021 for her Directors’ Fortnight premiere delivers on all of that promise and more: art-house audiences should respond to the opportunity to follow this beautifully-shot, gentle story as it eventually follows its own intriguing mysticism.
Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a senior sister, and Anu (Divya Prabha), her more juni.
