Although it’s an intimate, keenly-observed portrait of the Maximum City, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light discards the romanticism, the glorification attached to it right at the outset. Through montages—delicious interplays of sights, sounds, smells, and speed—she establishes Mumbai as a city of striving, a shiny hamster wheel, a mirage that takes more than it gives.
Also written by Kapadia, All We Imagine As Light starts documentary style with faceless voices of the working-class narrating their Mumbai story. One says that despite living in the city of dreams for over two decades, he’s scared to call it home because he knows he may have to pack up and leave at any moment. Another recalls how he couldn’t sleep the first night he relocated because of the fish stench.
Before long, cinematographer Ranabir Das’s lens focuses on two Malayali nurses on their train back home. Bathed in blue like the rest of the metropolis, Prabha (a terrific Kani Kusruti)—a woman in her late 30s—looks out into the night standing by the compartment gate. Meanwhile, Anu (Divya Prabha), her younger roommate, naps, splayed out on the seat, exhausted after a long day at work.
It’s not just their age that sets them apart, Prabha and Anu are distinctly disparate in who they are, the histories they carry, the secrets they harbor, and how they inhabit and move through the world. Reserved and responsible, Prabha is the personification of repressed longing, a woman coming to terms with the absence of her estranged husband. As for Anu, youthful and vivacious, she is audacious enough to be in a clandestine relationship with a Muslim boy Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon) and use Mumbai’s indifference and anonymity to fuel it.
If the first half of the 118-minute film examines Mumbai and its aches through Prabha, Anu, and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), the aging Maharashtrian cook at their hospital, All We Imagine As Light moves to a scenic beach village along the Konkan coast post interval. Displaced because of gentrification and forced to return to where she came from, Parvaty gets Prabha and Anu to help her with her relocation to the countryside. A stark contrast to Mumbai’s cacophony and relentlessness, it is in the quietude of the beachside idyll that the three women finally find freedom (that they were searching for in Mumbai all along) and their stories, a fitting resolution.
Although All We Imagine As Light is firmly rooted in Mumbai’s ethos, a global sensibility permeates throughout the film in the way it frames and approaches desire and sensuality. It is a sensorial feast; Kapadia’s gaze is uninhibited, unvarnished. A shining example of cinéma vérité, the film is Mira Nair-esque in its unabashed rawness and unafraid political commentary.
So fluid is Ranabir Das’s camerawork and Clement Pinteaux’s editing that scenes melt into each other. Some jump at you, to lodge and live rent free in the front of your head and heart. In one scene, Prabha gets a rice cooker unannounced from her husband who lives in Germany and hasn’t called her in over a year. In the middle of the night while wiping the floor of her cramped, cluttered apartment, she looks at it and embraces it like a lover overcome with longing.
There’s another in which Prabha has a conversation with a stranger she saves at the beach as though he were her husband, blurring the lines between real and fantastical. There’s yet another scene when Prabha and Parvaty throw stones at a billboard advertising one of the high-rise luxury apartments that renders Parvathy homeless. “Class is a privilege,” the billboard blares, adding, “Reserved for the privileged.”
But the most searing is how Kapadia uses burqa—a quintessential tool of female oppression—as a weapon of sexual liberation. Anu wears it as a disguise to break into Shiraz’s home when everyone else is away, hoping for some private time together. Though the plan fails, their inter-faith romance, in spite of the inherent risks and uncertainties, flowers.
This is Kapadia’s genius—finding brilliance in the mundane, creating a tapestry at once inviting and provocative. It is hardly surprising then that All We Imagine As Light has been winning big in the international festival circuit. With its luminous defiance, earthy narrative, and unassuming sensitivity, it is exactly the kind of Indian film that hard-boiled Western critics cannot resist rhapsodizing about. 2024 is drawing to a close but homegrown talent still needs white validation to get recognized in India.
