Film review

  • All We Imagine as Light

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Payal Kapadia (2024)

    From the start, writer-director Payal Kapadia’s description of Mumbai, where she was born, raised and educated, is different from – to cite the obvious example – outsider Danny Boyle’s splashy portrait of the place in Slumdog Millionaire (2008).  In the prologue to All We Imagine as Light, the camera moves swiftly through a frenetic street market and onto packed commuter trains; on the soundtrack, the voices of newcomers to Mumbai explain why they came to the city or their first impressions of it.  A docker says he found the foul smell of the waterfront overpowering, a woman that the busy streets helped her subdue her sadness.  Kapadia observes in a quasi-documentary style, conveying grimy heat and local colour without overstressing the one or romanticising the other.  She focuses on a succession of faces before settling on a fortyish woman on a train.  This is Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a hospital nurse, who will be the film’s central character and consciousness.

    Anu (Divya Prabha), the younger work colleague who shares Prabha’s tiny rented flat, will also be crucial to the story.  These two nurses are both Hindu and originally from Kerala but otherwise clearly distinguished.  They’re of different generations.  Prabha, in an arranged marriage, hasn’t seen her husband in years.  He left to work in Germany soon after they wed but Prabha is almost primly bound by her married state.  She won’t even go to the cinema with other nurses planning to drool at a Bollywood actor.  She keeps her emotional distance from Dr Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), her awkward, sensitive admirer at the hospital.  Anu is readier to enjoy life and consequently low on funds; at the start, Prabha agrees to pay her colleague’s monthly rent again though she warns this’ll be the last time that she does.  Anu’s parents are pushing her to make an arranged marriage but, unbeknown to them, she’s seeing a young Muslim man, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon).  (Prabha is aware of a boyfriend but not that he’s Muslim.)  There’s a third important female character.  Widowed Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a cook at the hospital where Prabha and Anu work, has been evicted from her home in a tenement block.  The building is about to be demolished to make way for luxury apartments (‘Class is a privilege:  reserved for the privileged’, the developer’s banner on the site proclaims).  Parvaty has no documents to prove that she and her late husband owned what had been their home for twenty-odd years.

    The structure of those opening sequences isn’t so unusual for a screen drama set in a big city.  It hints at the huge number of different lives that Kapadia could explore until she chooses just one of Mumbai’s more than twenty-one million citizens.  And while it’s a cliché to label the setting of a film a character in itself, that’s apt enough in this case – for positive and less positive reasons.  While Kapadia and Ranabir Das, her cinematographer, certainly animate the city – the buildings, the social life, the weather (it’s monsoon season) – the principals’ interactions, with each other and with other people, are well observed but unexciting.  A rice cooker arrives in the post for Prabha, from Germany.  Shiaz will be home alone when his parents go to a wedding and tells Anu to get hold of a burka to wear in his neighbourhood on the way to the house.  She’s kitted out and on her way when he texts apologetically to call off the tryst:  the wedding has been postponed due to the bad weather.  Prabha and Anu ask Manoj to give their pregnant cat an ultrasound to confirm the number of kittens she’s expecting:  Manoj is so shy in their presence he’s reluctant even to lay his hand on the cat’s belly.  Parvaty persuades well-behaved Prabha to join her in throwing stones at the new building development.

    An elderly hospital patient (Madhu Raja), refusing to take the medication that she tells Prabha is causing nightly visitations from her dead husband, makes a strong impression but isn’t seen again.  When a younger wife and mother (Shweta Prajaparti) explains her husband won’t have a vasectomy, Anu, without being asked, hands the woman contraceptives. The hospital sequences soon peter out, though.  About halfway through, when Kapadia inserts another city montage including further brief voiceovers, I wondered if we were in for just another hour of modest storytelling and, after that, a third, concluding montage.  Instead, Kapadia starts to surprise.  She cuts to a bus journey, as Prabha and Anu help Parvaty move back to the coastal village, near the port city of Ratnagiri, that she hails from.  You expect the pair’s overnight stay in the village to form an interlude before normal Mumbai service is resumed.  In fact, the film – or, at any rate, the camera – never returns to the city.  As All We Imagine as Light changes location, the narrative changes gear, becomes more compelling.

    Anu and Shiaz have decided to rearrange their rendezvous; he’s done a recce of the area that lies behind the seashore and the village.  Anu and he first get together in woodland, where Prabha catches sight of them, and later in a cave, where they have sex.  While this is going on, a commotion on the beach attracts Prabha’s attention.  The body of a man has been dragged from the sea:  the crowd that gathers round thinks he’s dead; Prabha gives him the kiss of life and he revives.  The man (Anand Sami) is taken somewhere nearby to rest; as he sleeps, nurse Prabha tends the cuts on his upper body.  A local woman comes in with food for the man and assumes Prabha is his wife.  Prabha immediately says she’s not but, after the other woman has left and the man has seemingly come to, she has a conversation with him as if he were her husband.  He explains his exhausting life in a German factory – working such long hours, in a place so dark, that he has to imagine the light in the world outside.

    Both these episodes are very well done.  Human figures have been sculpted into the caves:  Anu is magnetised by the expression of a woman who, she says, looks to have been stuck there for ages, waiting for something to happen.  There are graffiti in different languages on the cave walls – the work of other, perhaps forbidden lovers.  When Anu says that Shiaz himself has written one of the Malayalam inscriptions, he doesn’t deny it.  (Like Prabha and Anu, he’s Keralan; most of the film is in Malayalam although Hindi and Marathi feature, too.)  Kapadia films the lovemaking quite discreetly yet the sequence, not least because it’s the only such sequence in the film, is sensually expressive.  Prabha’s dialogue with the man she resuscitates is no less remarkable.  You don’t for a minute think this man really could be her long-lost husband yet the exchange between them makes sense.  After all, Prabha has brought a man back to a life and someone else has assumed he is her husband:  now’s the time to imagine what she would like to say to her husband and what he might say to her.

    Kani Kusruti’s strongly interior acting and Divya Prabha’s effortless changes of mood are highly complementary and effective:  their performance rhythms beautifully capture the temperamental gulf between Prabha, who is solemn, resigned yet tense, and impatient Anu.  Chhaya Kadam is a potent naturalistic performer, too.  Hridhu Haroon’s Shiaz is eager yet uncertain, a winning combination.  Just about everything in the young-love relationship works well.  One of the funniest bits comes when Anu shows Shiaz on her phone photos of the prospective Hindu husbands her parents have sent her, and he launches into sarcastic quick-fire impersonations of the types these men appear to be.  I was sometimes irritated by the piano on the soundtrack (excerpts from ‘The Homeless Wanderer’ by the Ethiopian composer and nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam, who died in 2023 in her hundredth year) but there’s no doubting Payal Kapadia has chosen her music with care:  the very different, discordant sounds of the Kolkata musician Topshe are also in evidence.

    The film ends on the beach, as night falls on the village.  Prabha asks the teenager (Saee Abhay Limaye) who runs a café-shack if she’s closing up.  The answer’s no, so Prabha, Parvaty and Anu take a table.  Prabha, more relaxed now, tells Anu she has seen her with her young man.  She suggests that Shiaz join them on the beach and he does.  The four sit comfortably together under the lights of the shack.  Ratnagiri hasn’t eclipsed Mumbai, not least because we know that, when Prabha and Anu return home, they’ll still face the same difficulties they faced twenty-four hours ago.  In other words, nothing is resolved in All We Imagine as Light.  Yet, for both women, something has been achieved.

    29 November 2024

  • Conclave

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Edward Berger (2024)

    A two-hour film about a competition has a head start.  You’ll likely want to know who ends up winning, regardless of the particular nature of the competition.  You’ll find out in half the time it takes to watch, for example, the Eurovision Song Contest nowadays.  This is one reason why Conclave easily holds an audience’s attention throughout.  Another reason is that, from quite an early stage, you start wondering how daft the storyline can get and the answer is, repeatedly, dafter than you thought possible.  This also makes for compulsive viewing, of a degraded kind.

    The main men behind this account of a fictional papal conclave are Edward Berger, Peter Straughan and Robert Harris.  The first two have enjoyed considerable recent success – Berger as director (and co-writer) of All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), Straughan as scriptwriter for the TV adaptations of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels (2015 and 2024).  For all its technical accomplishment, Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front was strenuous viewing for largely the wrong reasons.  Despite its best-in-show production values and plenty of meticulous acting, Wolf Hall is, I think, a drag.  (It’s not just because you already know what happened to Henry VIII’s wives et al that dramatically surprising moments are thin on the ground – although that’s down to Peter Kosminsky’s direction at least as much as to Straughan’s writing).  The novelist Robert Harris, author of the source material for Berger’s new film, has been successful – commercially successful, that is – for much longer than the other two.  Conclave, published in 2016, was by no means Harris’s first zeitgeist-savvy bestseller.

    When the incumbent pontiff (Bruno Novelli) dies suddenly, a conclave is convened by British cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), Dean of the College of Cardinals.  The perceived main contenders for the papacy are an American, a Canadian, a Nigerian and an Italian – Cardinals Bellini (Stanley Tucci), Tremblay (John Lithgow), Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) and Tedesco (Sergio Castellito), respectively.  Their theological and/or political positions are, broadly speaking, liberal (Bellini), middle-of-the-road (Tremblay), socially conservative (Adeyemi) and reactionary traditionalist (Tedesco).  Lawrence, himself a liberal, reveals early on to Bellini that he’s going through a crisis of faith:  he wanted out of the Curia but the late Pope was having none of it.  Other striking revelations come to light even before the conclave starts its sequestered proceedings in the Sistine Chapel.   Archbishop Woźniak (Jacek Koman), confidant of the late Pope, informs Lawrence that, on the eve of his death, the Pope demanded Tremblay’s resignation – which Tremblay denies.  Then someone not on the attendance list turns up.  Vincent Benitez (Carlos Diehz), a Mexican, claims to be a cardinal in Kabul, appointed in pectore.  Monsignor O’Malley (Brían F O’Byrne), the College of Cardinals’ ‘researcher’ and assistant to the Dean, gleans and reports to Lawrence that the late Pope and Benitez were close:  the Holy Father also paid for the Mexican’s recent travel to and from a Swiss clinic.  Benitez is admitted to the conclave.

    The papal practice of appointment in pectore (‘within the chest’), which dates back centuries, has indeed been used most often to make someone a cardinal; the pope then keeps the appointment secret, or may keep it secret, to himself and the appointee.  Although in pectore appointments have actually become rare in modern times (as far as anyone knows!), they regularly crop up in modern papal fiction and movies deriving from it:  Conclave follows in the tradition of Morris West’s The Shoes of the Fisherman, Malachi Martin’s Vatican: a novel, Tom Grace’s The Secret Cardinal, and so on.  Once Cardinal Benitez makes his entrance, it’s a pretty safe bet that, despite his humble protestations that he’s not interested in the papacy, he’ll feature at the business end of proceedings.  Since it’s soon clear that Cardinal Lawrence will be the story’s protagonist, it’s very likely he’ll emerge as a frontrunner, too – even though, plagued with religious doubt, he considers himself a non-starter.  Lawrence’s heartfelt opening speech to the conclave – urging his fellow cardinals to resist certainty (as inimical to faith) and embrace doubt (as essential to it) – inadvertently puts him in the running.

    The electorate numbers 108 cardinals; a candidate needs at least 72 votes (two thirds of the total) before white smoke will appear.  On the first vote, Adeyemi leads with Tremblay, Tedesco and Bellini all in close attendance; Lawrence, to his alarm, has five votes and Benitez one.   After two more votes, Adeyemi is edging close to the magic number and Edward Berger is on the point of starting his sensational process of elimination.  Berger has been cutting between formal sessions of the conclave, sotto voce conversations involving two or three characters in the shadows, and shots of the Vatican nuns at work – preparing and serving meals to the cardinals.  The nuns’ supervisor, Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini), also sometimes looks at a PC screen, which marks her out as different from the rest.  Late in the evening of the conclave’s first day, Lawrence hears raised voices outside his room and sees a nun disappearing down the corridor.  Next day at lunch, when the same nun, Sister Shanumi (Balkissa Maiga), drops a tray, Adeyemi shouts at her and storms out of the refectory.  Lawrence seeks an urgent interview with Shanumi; Sister Agnes tries in vain to prevent this; once she’s out of the way, the interview turns into a confession.  It seems that Berger is as bound as Lawrence by the Seal of the Confessional:  what Shanumi has to say is said off-camera.  In the face-to-face with Adeyemi that quickly follows, Lawrence doesn’t need to go into any detail before Adeyemi admits that he and Shanumi once had a love child together.  A man who was once a father in Lagos obviously can’t now be the Holy Father in Vatican City.

    Adeyemi is notoriously homophobic so it’s amusing poetic justice that asserting his heterosexuality is the cause of his downfall.  But the Sister Shanumi plot strand and its impact on voting in the conclave is baffling.  According to Wikipedia’s synopsis, ‘a whisper campaign derails Adeyemi’s candidacy over the next few votes’ but there’s no evidence of ‘whispering’ on screen.  (In this film, if you’re not a major character you take a vow of silence.)  It then emerges that Cardinal Tremblay, aware that Adeyemi would be a serious future rival for the papacy, arranged for Shanumi to move from Nigeria to Rome – that’s why the old Pope, when he found out, tried to force Tremblay’s resignation.  It’s clear as mud how Tremblay knew about or where to find Shanumi.  Anyway, he tries to brazen things out, claiming it was the late Pope who told him to recruit Adeyemi’s ex.  In desperation, Lawrence decides to break some different seals, in the papal apartment.  He discovers that Tremblay not only looked up Shanumi on his own initiative but has also been bribing fellow cardinals in exchange for their support in the conclave, whenever it happens.  Lawrence makes a statement on Tremblay’s simony etc to the conclave; Sister Agnes chips in, to endorse what Lawrence has said.  With Adeyemi out of contention, Tremblay was all set to succeed as the compromise candidate.  Now he too is done for.

    Just as Lawrence is casting his vote in the ballot that follows, a bomb explosion rocks the Sistine Chapel.  When he next appears, Lawrence has a couple of little scratches on his face; a discreet quantity of plaster dust sits tippet-like on his and other scarlet cassocks.  A suicide bomber has killed numerous people in the crowd of pilgrims gathering outside in anticipation of the announcement of a new pope.  In an anti-Islamist tirade, Tedesco calls for the Church to take up arms in a new holy war.  With Bellini’s candidacy having bombed in a different way, Lawrence now appears to be the moderates’ last hope of preventing Tedesco from becoming pontiff – until Benitez, who has gradually increased his support in each successive vote so far, counters Tedesco’s sound and fury with a plea for peace.  He tells the conclave that he knows – from earlier postings in the Congo and Iraq, as well as from his time in Afghanistan – the true cost of war.  The Cardinal of Kabul receives enough votes to make the next ballot the last.  Habemus papam.

    Not so fast, though.  Lawrence, relieved not to win, belatedly learns from O’Malley details of Benitez’s medical treatment in Switzerland:  a laparoscopic hysterectomy.  (I’m not making this up – though Robert Harris did.)   Cue Lawrence’s final confrontation with a seemingly doomed candidate for the top job, except that Benitez isn’t doomed.  He explains that it was when he had his appendix removed a few years ago that he learned he had a uterus and ovaries:  in Switzerland, he decided at the last minute not to go through with the hysterectomy but, with the agreement of the late Pope, to carry on ‘as God made me’.  Meek, saintly Vincent Benitez becomes Pope Innocent XIV.  It couldn’t really happen:  John Mulderig’s piece on Conclave in Catholic Review points out that in pectore ‘promotions such as Benitez’s … are null and void if not publicly announced during the lifetime of the pope who made them’.  With due respect to Mulderig, whose balanced, gracefully witty review[1] is highly recommended, this movie’s infringement of canon law seems among the least of its sins.

    Conclave is ridiculous not least in its self-importance.  Volker Bertelmann’s score contributes to that quality; so do the visuals.  This isn’t a case of natural light aka darkness for the interiors:  lamps are often on in rooms yet Stéphane Fontaine’s crepuscular cinematography renders the scene hard to make out.  Berger probably means this to indicate the twilight of the Church but I can’t have been the only member of the grey audience in Curzon Richmond whose thoughts turned to cataracts.  Fontaine’s occasional overhead shots, in the Sistine Chapel (or the set designers’ ingenious recreation of it) and the square outside, are very striking:  a God’s-eye view of the conclave in session; an image of the cardinals walking in a rain shower under white umbrellas (they look like moving toadstools, with the white stalk and red top reversed).   But these bravura images aren’t in keeping with the main visual scheme.  They’re expressions, almost literally, of Conclave‘s high opinion of itself.  Although Peter Straughan, perhaps courtesy of Robert Harris in some instances, has come up with plenty of sententious dialogue, my favourite line was Monsignor O’Malley’s ‘I should have told you this morning but …’, which precedes his revelation to Lawrence about Benitez’s unexpected physical equipment.  This line is spoken only the once but ‘I should have told you before’ is really the film’s mantra.

    Berger and Straughan are slippery about naming actual popes:  it depends whether or not the remark is innocuous.  For example, two characters, looking at a wardrobe of papal vestments, have a chuckle that these had to be adjusted to fit tubby Pope John.  OK, this is fat-shaming John XXIII but someone else refers to a pope who fought for Hitler – without mentioning Benedict XVI explicitly.  The script is carelessly facile about the theological and political direction of recent papacies.  Tedesco rails against a continuing drift towards liberalism and Bellini warns that Tedesco’s appointment will undo decades of liberalising progress – although John Paul II, whose pontificate lasted more than a quarter of a century (1978-2005), is widely considered a conservative figure.  The political divisions within the conclave prove to be remarkably shallow in any case:  it takes only a few make-peace-not-war platitudes from Benitez for consensus to reign.  (These platitudes should go down a storm with the jihadists with whom the new pope means to break bread.)  At the start of Conclave, Lawrence and others are wary of doing anything that might generate negative publicity – ‘You know what the press are like!’  By the end of the film, they’re not remotely worried that Benitez’s intersex characteristics, evidently a matter of medical record, might somehow come to light.

    Although some critics are praising Conclave as enjoyable pulp, it’s amazing how many others seem prepared to take it seriously – simply because the twaddle that issues from characters’ mouths is delivered by some high-class actors, and keeps ticking boxes.  The Catholic Church is mired in shameful secrets and cover-ups.  The Curia is as liable to shameless politicking as any secular set-up.  The papacy is the ultimate patriarchy.  And so on.  Ralph Fiennes acts with integrity – producing some especially impressive sobbing during Lawrence’s discoveries in the papal apartment – but he’s saddled with such an obvious man-of-conscience role that his portrait can’t develop much.  You can make out in the prevailing half-light the deep lines on Lawrence’s troubled brow:  they announce from the word go who he is.  It’s nearly thirty years since Fiennes last had an Oscar nomination (for The English Patient (1996)).  This performance looks set to end the drought.  Fair enough, but if it does, it’ll seem all the more a pity that his imaginative work in The Invisible Woman (2013), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and The Dig (2021) wasn’t similarly recognised.  Isabella Rossellini is on screen quite a few times before she utters a word.  You can therefore be sure that, when she does finally speak, her words will command attention.  Sister Agnes has opened her mouth before she joins with Lawrence in denouncing Tremblay’s dire wheeler-dealing but this is definitely her big moment.

    With a strong screen presence but little to say, Rossellini embodies the subservience of the female characters in Conclave and prompts the question in the audience’s mind, ‘Isn’t it time to give women more of a voice in the Catholic Church?’  (Sister Shanumi, in an obviously more limited way, does something of the same.)  Viewers hoping for an excitingly enlightened decision in the papal conclave are going to be disappointed, then, that the film can’t eventually offer more than Benitez’s unorthodox genitalia.  When he tells Lawrence, ‘I am as God made me’, the words call to mind the moment in The Naked Civil Servant when a stern official trots out the injunction ‘Male and female created He them’ and Quentin Crisp comes back with, ‘Male and female created He me!’  Unlike Crisp, though, the new Pope Innocent won’t be proclaiming his difference from other men.  Those who know his secret will keep the information in pectore.  Or will they?  Robert Harris hasn’t written a Conclave follow-up yet but you never know.  If there’s a screen sequel, I hope it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a comedy.  In which case, Edward Berger will not be the person to direct Conclave II.

    24 November 2024

    [1] See https://catholicreview.org/movie-review-conclave/

     

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