All We Imagine As Light, directed by Payal Kapadia, is a delicate exploration of intimacy, love, and sisterhood.
It opens with sweeping shots of nighttime Mumbai; hawkers selling street food and commuters bustling into trains. Overlaying this, are voices in regional Indian languages like Bengali and Marathi, explaining snippets of their lives. The importance of language creeps up throughout, whether it's a character adapting to Hindi from Malayalam, or text messages, it all adds to the pervading sense of loneliness in the metropolis. It's also great to see language visited this way because Hindi is the primary language in much of Indian mainstream cinema, and the dozens of other languages spoken across India are rarely featured.
All We Imagine As Light follows weary-eyed Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a nurse in a Mumbai hospital. Her arranged marriage went south when her husband suddenly disappeared and went to Germany. She shares a cramped flat with her junior colleague, Anu (Divya Prabha), who is head over heels for her boyfriend, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon). They both keep their relationship secret as Shiaz is Muslim and Anu is Hindu — a match that is still sadly controversial in many parts of Indian culture. The third to complete the sisterhood is their friend, Parvaty (prolific actress Chhaya Kadam), a cook at the same hospital.
Parvaty's husband recently passed away, and the developers of the flat she lives in want to squeeze her out of it, arguing that she can't prove ownership. She is another casualty of the class disparities prevalent across India. It's one way in which Kapadia subtly highlights institutional roadblocks as they appear in the day-to-day life of the women, without needing to be didactic.
Kapadia and cinematographer Ranabir Das, use light in wondrous ways and conjure up a film grain bringing a dream-like aesthetic. One striking shot captures Prabha's sari hung to dry by an open balcony door, moonlight filtering through the fluttering fabric and highlighting shifting hues of blue and black. Actors are often shot from one side of their faces where the light hits, and they repeatedly draw the camera to focus on tiny pinpoints of light reflected in their eyes. This mingling of light and shadow aptly embodies what Parvaty says, “They say Mumbai is the city of dreams, but it's the city of illusion.”
Sex is shown with a naturalism rarely seen elsewhere — body hair, moles, and a distinct lack of the male gaze are abundant. Even bodily states are presented without inhibition, like Prabha squatting to go for a wee in a jungle, in defiance of the number of times we've all seen cinema depict men doing the same thing (standing up, of course).
The authenticity builds to a nuanced depiction of the women, especially Prabha. Her husband's only attempt at communication with her after many years, was to send her a new rice cooker. It's an ordinary object to most, but in one understated yet powerful scene, Prabha kneels in the dark of her kitchen to retrieve the rice cooker from beneath a cabinet and clutches it tightly as though embracing a lover. The rice cooker, having once passed through her husband's hands, feels like the only tangible connection she has left to him—the closest thing to the intimacy she knows she should have received.
There's a captivating intrigue around these women, who are trying to find their place in a world that has a set of predefined rules for them. At the same time, they are joined in sisterhood through their desire to be free from the tyranny of those rules and to be free to love themselves, and others, as they please.
All We Imagine As Light may have been incomprehensibly snubbed for India's Oscar entry but it will undoubtedly shed light on a bold generation of Indian filmmaking.
All We Imagine As Light is screening at the London Film Festival 2024
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