Mumbai is hardly an unfamiliar cinematic city, but it’s been a long time since it was presented with the love and serenity afforded to it by Payal Kapadia’s magical new film All We Imagine As Light, a tale of romances old and new, ending and beginning, all in a city of staggering ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity. The result is something both truly transporting and achingly romantic, taking one of the busiest cities in the world and finding moments of wrenching quiet within it as three women navigate how they, and the things and people they love, fit in there.
These three women are all nurses employed at the same hospital; Prabha (Kani Kusruti), whose seniority means she helps instruct new recruits, Anu (Divya Prabha), a younger and more junior nurse who is also Prabha’s roommate and a sort of daughter/little sister figure to her, and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), who is approaching the end of her time there. Prabha has reached the end of a relationship, albeit one that never really got started – it’s been over a year since she last heard from her arranged marriage husband, who now lives and works in Germany and has sent an oddly ominous gift of a fancy rice cooker despite no other communication.
Anu, on the other hand, is just getting started with a nice young man she’s clearly pretty crazy about – this is Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), with whom she shares a very easy, teasy chemistry, though they have yet to make their relationship physical. In a densely packed city of over 12 million people, intimacy and privacy can be hard to come by, especially for a couple that is Hindu (Anu) and Muslim (Shiaz), whose relationship will be frowned upon by the nosey and conservative neighbours from both sides.
There’s a longing, even jealousy, from Prabha to be able to capture in her own life what Anu is currently enjoying, and this leads to some spats, but this is about as conflict-ful as All We Imagine As Light gets. Kapadia instead spins her drama from sweet, meandering conversation, wittily written and luminously performed by all her actors, mostly on the way to or from work. It’s a chronicle of mundane yet meaningful everyday life that builds and builds with a gradual power that you barely even notice until, by the end, it has become overwhelming.
Gorgeous, unhurried camerawork finds beauty everywhere, from the wet floors after a rainstorm to an idyllic coastal cave during a trip to the countryside in which Prabha and Anu help Parvaty move back to her old village (Parvaty’s struggles are not romantic but logistical, her flat in Mumbai being demolished by developers). It’s during this trip that Kapadia allows the more magical and mythical in, dreams and potentials finally fulfilled in gently surreal interludes, but her grounded details are just as wonderful. From Doctor Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), who is sweet on Prabha and writes Malayalam poetry for her to haggling over fish prices to prep some delicious-looking curries to the adorable and chatty pregnant cat shared by Prabha and Anu, everything here breathes and shivers with life.
It’s a twinkling illusion completed by a minimalist but fantastic score and, by the time the credits rolled, I found myself genuinely reluctant to leave my seat, unwilling to walk out of this world and back into the real one. What an achievement, to score such power from a film with such a gentle heart – this is a story almost entirely about nice people who like each other. It might not sound like a thriller on paper and, yes, ‘riveting’ might not quite be the word to describe All We Imagine As Light. ‘Exquisite’ would be.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 