The rhythms of bustling, working-class Mumbai are brought to vivid life in “All We Imagine as Light.” The stunning narrative debut of filmmaker Payal Kapadia explores the lives of three women in the city whose existence is mostly transit and work. Even that isn’t always enough to get by and pay the rent. One of the women, a widow, recently retired from working her whole life at a city hospital, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), is even facing eviction.
The other two, roommates and co-workers in the maternity ward are in different parts of life. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) has a husband from an arranged marriage who she doesn’t see and rarely speaks to. His life, we learn, is in Germany. She gets an occasional, ominous physical reminder of his existence in objects, like a fancy rice maker, that arrives one day. But she carries the weight of her arrangement everywhere, an invisible anchor on her being.
Anu (Divya Prabha) is even younger, trying to figure out what her life is going to look like and already in something of an impossible situation: She’s fallen in love with Shiz (Hridhu Haroon), who is Muslim. She’s Hindu. But in a city of over 20 million, a secret relationship can have some room to grow. Yes, they’re hiding this from their families, a burden in and of itself, but in the night markets with the city glimmering and moving around them, they’re able to just be.
Prabha is a little judgmental of her more carefree (possibly careless) younger housemate. More companions by circumstance than friends exactly, these women have different ideas about life, but we watch as they grow closer and understand one another more. Prabha even allows herself to go for a walk with a doctor who is clearly interested in her. A small act of agency and rebellion against her circumstances.
These are not easy lives, either: Their apartment is drab and small, their activities mundane, their conversations ordinary. But even as hard as it is to exist in a place that not only doesn’t love you back, it barely even notices you, something is always happening. How can anything be truly dull in a place always thrumming with life? Far from being a maudlin, bleak affair, Kapadia makes the banal cinematic. There is a dreamlike incandescence to it all, not a rejection of reality so much as a poetic detachment from it.
And like a dream, this is a film that washes over you. The mechanisms of the plot are not really the point, we’re just moving in time with Anu and Prabha. And while Anu’s forbidden love and Prabha’s existential longing will surely come to a head at some point in their journey, the most urgent of realities is Parvaty’s unexpected housing crisis. The city is making way for more luxury high rises and pricing out the people who make everything run and work. So, they go to the sea.
Anu and Prabha accompany Parvaty on her move back to her small coastal village in the final act. Suddenly it feels like everyone can breathe. It may be a little cliché, but you really feel it in your bones as an audience member. Our characters get a release: Anu can have a truly private rendezvous with Shiz; Prabha gets to be seen, too.
“All We Imagine as Light,” in theaters Friday, has been widely celebrated since its Cannes premiere, and Kapadia heralded as a major new talent to watch, which is just as it should be. The film is a reminder of the transcendent power of cinema, even, and perhaps especially, when not all that much is happening.
“All We Imagine as Light,” a Sideshow/Janus Films release in select theaters Friday, has not been rated by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 118 minutes. Four stars out of four.