Director Payal Kapadia with Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha

My main – indeed, by the end, my only – thought about this film was that it was unnecessarily slow. My residual impatience has pushed the film to one side for a few days, but I need to pull it out again to put it on my blog pile.

There was a lot in it. During the opening credits, with all its French and Dutch companies, I wondered if it were indeed an Indian film. But it is – and is both familiar and strange. For example, I had no idea what languages people were speaking and what that implied about the background/status/interactions, etc, and I realise now how that adds to the film’s strength in positioning its characters in a particular society, place and time. It’s set in Mumbai and opens with nighttime shots of city streets against voiceovers (by real people?) talking about the precariousness and transience of life there, even after decades of living there – something that was picked up later. It wears its feminism lightly and subtly: the women form a classic trio, all defined externally by “husband”. The unmarried nurse is being pressured to marry by her parents (while illicitly in love with a Muslim man). The husband of the married nurse has lived and worked in Germany since shortly after their arranged marriage and she hasn’t heard from him in over a year; she is therefore in marital limbo and must forego romantic love. The widowed cook is being forced out of her home because her late husband left no paperwork confirming her right to live there, and must return to her village. There is, briefly at the beginning, a fourth woman, an elderly widow, also suffering from “husband”: she is confused and imagines – to her horror – that the torso of her husband is in her kitchen. Once again, it sets a precedent, for I thought of her again as the married nurse looked at the rice cooker made in Germany, lowering at her from a corner under the kitchen worktop, as if it were the familiar of her vanished husband.

Visually it lives up to its title. The Mumbai scenes are often at night, after work when it is slightly cooler. Dark, hemmed-in, busy. In the widow’s village we are blinded by the light and space – a breathing space, a sense of hope and light-heartedness. Here – as if in a fairy tale – changes are made to all three women’s lives. The final scene is on the nighttime beach in a shack bar brilliantly illuminated, balancing points of light against the background darkness.

Having thought about it sufficiently to be able to write about it, I see how good and thoughtful a film it was. But, yeah, a bit slow.