Payal Kapadia's Palme d'Or winner moves through Mumbai with a patience that is itself a kind of argument. In an era of accelerated cinema — fast cuts, urgent plotting, relentless incident — she insists on duration, on the way light falls through a hospital window, on the texture of a commute. The film earns every minute of its two hours.
The story, loosely: two nurses share a flat and a working life. Prabha, the elder, receives a letter from a husband she hasn't seen in years. Anu, younger, is conducting a secret relationship with a Muslim man. A third woman, Parvaty, faces eviction. These are the bones of a social-realist drama, but Kapadia is not a social-realist director.
To watch the film is to feel that someone has taken seriously the idea that ordinary lives deserve the full apparatus of cinematic attention.
What distinguishes the film is its quality of attention. Kapadia renders her characters' inner lives without ever stating them — through glance, through posture, through the way Prabha stands at the window of a train. The performances are extraordinary in the sense that they do not feel like performances at all.
The cinematography by Ranabir Das moves between styles — realist during the working scenes, dreamlike and loose during sequences set near the sea — in a way that never feels arbitrary. The film's final act, which I will not describe, earns its images through everything that has preceded them.
One of the finest films in recent memory. Tender, rigorous, and alive to the world in a way that very few films manage. The kind of cinema that makes you want to pay closer attention to your own life when you leave the theatre.