Piano Fighters

My thoughts on All We Imagine as Light, Armor and The Piano Lesson

Set in present-day Mumbai, Payal Kapadia’s extraordinary new film All We Imagine as Light tells the story of three women who work together in the same hospital as nurses who are all facing emotional crossroads in their lives. The sensible Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is startled one day to receive a rice cooker in the mail that she deduces was sent by the man she married in an arranged ceremony years earlier who immediately took off to Germany and cut off all communications with her. Is the gift meant to symbolize a definitive end to their relationship or her husband’s attempt to rekindle it, a question that has an increased pressing meaning when another doctor at the hospital begins to demonstrate feelings for her despite his knowledge of her questionable marital state. Anu (Divya Prabha), a younger woman who has just moved in with Prabha, is in a relationship with Shiraz that is complicated by the fact that he is Muslim and she isn’t, leading her at one point to don a burqa to a proposed hookup with him at his parents house that has to be aborted when they return home unexpectedly. Finally, there is the older and recently widowed Pavarty (Chhaya Kadam), who finds herself in a bureaucratic nightmare when she is threatened with eviction from the apartment where she and her late husband lived when it turns out that there is no documentation that proves that she has the right to be there. When Pavarty decides to quit her job and leave the city for her quiet coastal hometown, Prabha and Anu tag along to help her make the move and in the more relaxed atmosphere, they are able to have epiphanies regarding their own lives as well.

The above description may not make the film sound particularly interesting, I suppose, and its methodical pacing may end up frustrating some viewers as well. Those who stick it out, however, are liable to be knocked out by how deep this one really cuts. Kapadia manages to juggle the individual stories of her three key characters along with a meditation of the ways in which modern cities like Mumbai can attract outsiders (including Prabha, Anu and Pavarty) with  promises that inspire them to leave everything they have ever known but which offer no guarantees of success or happiness as well as a shift to near-magic realism during the last section in Pavarty’s hometown, where Prabha’s value as a nurse is finally seen and Anu can see Shiraz without fear of reprisal. Kapadia demonstrate great affection for her characters throughout, which comes through even stronger via the lovely performances from the three co-leads. Beyond that, this is simply a gorgeous movie to look at—with a focus on the color blue throughout, Ranabir Das’s cinematography is among the most striking to be seen on a movie screen this year. A winner of the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, All We Imagine as Light is a one-of-a-kind work that is equally strong in terms of emotional truth and formal beauty and is not to be missed

.The IMDb listing for Armor classifies it under “action,” “crime” and “thriller” but be warned—it isn’t at all thrilling, it contains precious little action and the most notable criminal activity on display is the theft of 89 minutes from anyone foolish enough to watch it. Jason Patric stars as James, a widower struggling with alcohol issues while working as an armored car driver with son Casey (Josh Wiggins), who he has had a strained relationship with for several years in the wake of a family tragedy. One day, against his better judgement, he agrees to transport a package from a credit union that is not on the manifesto and sure enough, while crossing a remote bridge on their rounds, the two are waylaid by a gang of criminals led by Rook (Sylvester Stallone) who manage to knock the truck on its side and trap them inside. Unfortunately for Rook and his cohorts, including the increasingly twitchy Smoke (Dash Mihok), James refuses to surrender the truck and its contents and while the thieves try to figure out a way to get inside, he is hoping to figure out some kind of escape plan for himself and his wounded son before the latter bleeds out.

I cannot rightly imagine that there is anyone out there who is actually waiting with bated breath to see Armor but if such people do exist, I suspect that even they will come away disappointed with the lazily assembled fare that is being offered up here. Those going into it expecting a tense action thriller will be disappointed to find those expected elements in precious short supply—the first burst of action doesn’t occur until nearly a third of the way into the film and occurs only sporadically afterwards, notable only for the chintziness of the CGI gunfire. Those curious to see Stallone take on his first bad guy role since the pre-Rocky cult classic Death Race 2000 (unless we are counting his goofball villain turn in Spy Kids 3D) will be disappointed to learn that he isn’t in the film that much (his scenes were reportedly shot in one day and, to judge from the final results, he most likely didn’t wind up putting in for overtime) and even when he is on the screen, he seems oddly detached from the proceedings. There are plenty of other problems as well, from giving Patric virtually nothing done to do to giving Mihok entirely too much to do in his terrible turn as the hothead thief to the bizarre decision to illustrate the past incident causing the friction between James and Casey via an extended flashback that brings the proceedings to a dead halt at precisely the moment when things should be ramping up and which only serves to make the resulting estrangement more of a contrivance than anything else. Devoid of suspense, energy or any real reason to exist, Armor is as nondescript as the title suggests and the only thing that it really has in its favor is how utterly forgettable it is

.Following Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, The Piano Lesson, marks the third film to be made from August Wilson’s Century Cycle of ten plays chronicling African-American life in Pittsburgh during each decade of the 20th century, Although set in the 1930s, this one has its roots in the past, specifically in a piano that decades ago had been traded to a rich white family in exchange for two enslaved members of the Charles family and which was later stolen back by their some descendants under tragic circumstances. The piano, which features images of members of the Charles family ornately carved into it, is now in the possession of Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler), who lives with daughter Maretha (Sjylar Aleece Smith) and uncle Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson) and who has not touched the piano for fear of waking the ghosts of the past. However, when her brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington) unexpectedly turns up with the plan to sell the piano and use his half of the earnings to buy some of the land in Mississippi that his family was once forced to work as slaves, she refuses to let him. Over the course of the film, the two have a series of arguments about the piano and what it represents to them and wind up stirring up the ghosts of their past.

The film marks the directorial debut of Malcolm Washington—the son of Denzel (who co-produced this, as well as the previous Wilson adaptations) and brother of John David—and while credit is certainly due for attempting such an ambitious undertaking for a first feature, the results are deeply uneven. On the positive side, the performances are all stirring and effective throughout—Jackson, Washington and co-stars Ray Fisher and Michael Potts all appeared in the show on Broadway in its acclaimed 2022 revival and Deadwyler is more than their equal in the ways that she conveys her character’s emotional turmoil as she is forced to contemplate what the piano really represents about her and her family’s past. On the other hand, the sheer physical impact of the actors on the stage as they engage in their alternately angry and heartbreaking arguments in the pressure-cooker environment of the house that is the single setting  is inevitably lost in the translation to the screen—said arguments start to become repetitive after a while and Washington’s attempts to replicate that energy with wild camera moves is more distracting than edifying. An even bigger problem comes from the decision by Washington and co-writer Virgil Williams to take the play’s metaphorical ghosts and literalize them in ways that badly distract from the main story by offering the kind of supernatural imagery one might expect to find in a Conjuring spinoff and not is a serious drama examining the damage cause by lingering generational trauma. Had it abandoned its ultimately distracting attempts to make the material more overtly cinematic, The Piano Lesson might have become the powerful human drama that it is clearly aiming to be instead of little more than the curious misfire that it has become.