All We Imagine as Light (2024) Light (2024) review by Jake Munn
All We Imagine as Light, the second feature from writer/director Payal Kapadia, will capture your heart in its ability to both sting and soothe. Transcending its genre, it cements itself as a standalone masterpiece, with Kapadia an auteur in bloom.
The plot follows the entwined lives of three women who work together in a hospital in Mumbai. Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a nurse trapped in a marriage estranged through distance, lives with trainee nurse Anu (Divya Prabha), who is under pressure from her Hindu family to choose a suitor. Anu is in love with Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon) however, a Muslim whose religion poses its own restrictions. Meanwhile, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) faces eviction from her home, her husband recently deceased and his paperwork left in disarray. She has no choice but to move back to her home village on the coast with help from Prahba and Anu.
Citing an influence of documentary storytelling on her narrative, the Cannes Grand Prix winner treads daring, perhaps even controversial ground in her vision; despite this being a story of love, it’s just as much a story of rising above its restrictions and the attitude of stoicism, embodied as ‘the spirit of Mumbai’, that pervades all. During the first act, Prabha receives a rice cooker in the post without any note or letter, and she reasons that it must be from her husband working abroad in Germany whom she’s had no word from in over a year. This leads her into a state of growing disassociation with the city and those around her as she holds out futile hope for his return. She ultimately turns her back on a chance for new love with her long-time admirer and colleague and we bear witness through Kusruti’s compelling performance and the film’s dreamlike ambience to how she’s slowly ground down beneath the weight of entrapment in a city that holds little else for her anymore.
These concepts of tradition are frequently explored as illusory and temporal, themes that return throughout the film’s 118 minute runtime. As the youthful Anu tries to keep her love a secret from her mentor, she in one scene uses the disguise of a hijab to visit her boyfriend in his Muslim neighbourhood. She switches between two religions, two dress codes, almost indifferently. Anu’s free-spirited nature and attitude to her religion builds resentment in Prabha, a conflict that drives a wedge between them. It is only through helping Parvaty move back to her coastal village that the pair are able to rediscover the common ground that unites them. Indeed, it is this very escape from the city that enables the three of them to learn to live again, their friendship standing as quiet rebellion to all they’ve ever known.
Kapadia worked with cinematographer Ranabir Das to capture Mumbai in Polaroid-like backdrops, often at night time with heavy rain, resisting the use of establishing shots to pull us out from the intimacy of the character’s lives. The director selects these wide shots carefully: a lingering view of the ocean, an aerial shot of a jungle canopy. Each time the characters reach a new milestone, we’re gifted with a wider perspective, the opening of our peripheral view like a breath of fresh air. The coastal village itself is a relief after the confines of Mumbai, a welcome dash of colour as the film enters into its second and third acts.
The performances are a tour-de-force in solemn revolution against circumstance. The brilliance of this movie is in its small moments; how the characters slowly find their voices again despite the odds. We celebrate Prabha’s spiritual emancipation through a chance encounter as much as Anu’s embracement of true love out in the open. By the time we reach the film’s final and most beautiful shot, we realise we’ve discovered something that is a true light in the dark.
It’s been some time since I’ve seen a film I connected with as much as ‘All We Imagine as Light’. This is culturally significant cinema, intrinsically relevant to our times.
Released on the 29th November at the BFI.
