First, let’s make it clear that, in spite of its name, the Cannes Grand Prix winner at the annual Cannes Film Festival is the film that came in second. The winner gets the Palme D’Or. I don’t know whom to ask about using the term Grand Prix for the second prize, but I am sure that, whomever they are, their answer won’t be acceptable.

Okay, putting that aside, let it be known that the Cannes Grand Prix winner in 2024 was All We Can Imagine as Light, filmed in India, and given a name with its own problem. It is (I can attest to this) impossible to remember the name of this film more than about fifteen minutes. Maybe ten.

If you go to Rotten Tomatoes, you will see that this film gets a 100% critics rating, with over 100 reviews posted, and it gets an 82% viewers’ rating, which isn’t too bad, either. Most of the critics raved about both the film and about Payal Kapadia, a young (under 40, that’s young) Indian woman who both wrote the script and directed the film, her first non-documentary feature. We saw the film yesterday at the American Film Institute in Silver Spring.

It seems to me it is clearly a film for women, which is not surprising, I guess. But it is a unique women’s film (I am not using the word feminist, because I don’t really know what that means today), in that two men in the film, both of whom do have subordinate but important roles, are not bad guys; they are both what they would call in Mumbai (at the Chabad House) mensches.

The three main characters are women, two nurses and a cook, who work at a hospital in Mumbai. I think that isolation, frustrated aspirations, and the subordination of women in India are the main foci. Two of the women, who are roommates in an apartment you would not want to live in, are nurses. One is a young Hindu woman with a Muslim boy friend. The other is a married Hindu woman, but it was an arranged marriage, her husband almost immediately went to work in Berlin and she has not heard from him in over a year; she has a suitor, a doctor at the hospital, whom she has to reject. The third woman, a little older, is a cook at the hospital. She is a widow and is being evicted from her apartment (the building is to be torn down and a luxuriant skyscraper to be built in its place), and she cannot get any relocation help because she cannot find the necessary “papers” that her husband never told her about.

9Mumbai is filled with people. It is filled with poor people, with whom the three women seem to have no relationship, and rich people, none of whom you really see, but who are clearly represented by the Mumbai skyline which always seems to loom in the background. Each of the three women are by themselves in a city to which they migrated from their home villages, and where they never quite feel right or at home.

Towards the end of the film, the cook decides to move back to her home village, and the nurses help her with the move. The young Muslim suitor decides to go as well, and the nurse with the estranged husband resuscitates a drowning man (the village is on the coast), and he turns out to be a good guy, too.

The film ends in the village. What the future holds for anyone, we don’t know.

In spite of the Cannes prize, the critics’ ratings, and many other awards that the film has won or been nominated for, I have to wonder. This is a slow, slow, slow film, without a real plot line, and it really doesn’t go anywhere. We were both surprised at the acclaim. But what do we know?

Oh, by the way, the film is in Hindi and Malayalam and Marathi. The different languages spoken in the film, each with an occasional English word thrown in, adds to the feeling of isolation, as does the quite interesting camera work and lighting.

One more thing: the film doesn’t make you want to plan your next vacation in Mumbai. That’s for sure.