Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light is an orthodox, mild-mannered relationship drama with a seasoned cast. With its simple emotions and straightforward storytelling, the film couldn’t be more different from the experimentalism and political edge which propelled the Indian filmmaker’s found-footage documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing to the film-festival stratosphere in 2021, when she won Cannes’ Golden Eye award for best documentary. But her delicate touch remains very much the same, as she offers a gentle but clear critique of the challenges faced by women in India today.
A two-parter which begins in a monsoon-soaked, magenta-hued Mumbai and ends amidst the crimson-and-green landscapes of a fishing village, All We Imagine As Light is as soothing on the eye as it is on the heart. Foregoing festival-friendly representations of this Indian metropolis as the embodiment of sleaze and chaos, the Mumbai-based director – who readily describes herself as someone from a “privileged class” in the press notes – has opted to depict her hometown more as a city of sadness than one of sensational violence.
Revolving around relationships shaped nearly entirely on generosity and kindness – and that includes those involving men – All We Imagine As Light offers what its title suggests, as Kapadia chooses to tackle issues such as arranged marriages and inter-ethnic tensions with subtlety rather than simplistic sloganeering. With its three leading actors delivering engaging turns as women from various backgrounds and temperaments, this first fiction feature, and India’s first competition entry at Cannes for three decades, is designed to endear all and offend none.
Kapadia establishes the film’s serene tone from the opening sequence in which women are shown eating, sleeping, laughing and listening to music in a “ladies’ compartment” on a train. A while later, nurses in a hospital talk excitedly about movies over lunch and gleefully discuss what films they are going to watch after work, their lust for life very palpable.
But two of them stand aloof from the camaraderie, and for different reasons. As one of the senior staff members in the ward, Prabha (Kani Kusruti) cuts a forbidding figure for the younger ones, as she prefers to do good – for her patients, and for colleagues in trouble – than being good fun. Her melancholy also stems from her angst about her husband, who has gone incommunicado since moving to Germany for work, an uncertainty that prevents her from contending with her feelings about a doctor-colleague’s attentions.
Prabha’s younger colleague and roommate Anu (Divya Prabha, Declaration), meanwhile, is a free-spending free spirit who only has time for her boyfriend Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon). While she is bold enough to dismiss her family’s repeated attempts to match her with a financially suitable and caste-compatible fiancé, she is ill at ease with the repercussions she might face for dating a Muslim man.
Completing the trio is the older Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a cook in the hospital cafeteria who is about to lose her home of two decades to property developers. The working-class counterpart to the two comparatively privileged nurses, whose encounters with the deprived masses are mostly limited to their brief interactions with patients at work, Parvaty slowly brings Prabha out of her shell and into personal and political emancipation.
Ranabir Das’s camerawork, along with the production design by Piyusha Chalke, Yashasvi Sabharwal and Shamim Khan, manages to strike a delicate balance in evoking Mumbai’s cramped cityscape without tipping it towards the ominous. But just as the actors’ small gestures are crucial to the narrative, small (or small-ish) objects are used effectively to take the place of suppressed traits and unspoken emotions. Take the two presents Prabha receives from the two men in her life, for example. While her husband (supposedly) sends her a big red rice cooker from Europe, her doctor-suitor gives her a beautifully-adorned book of poetry – a metaphor, perhaps, for Prabha’s need to choose between sense and sensibility.
An eviction, a resignation and a political-religious parade later, the film’s second half unfolds in a dramatically different palette by the sea. Unlike the nocturnal Mumbai and Kapadia’s visual and verbal depiction of strangers in a strange land, the coastal town of Ratnagiri always appears engulfed by the bright light of the day. Here, the women are finally able to explore their desires and doubts, the climax being an interwoven sequence switching between Prabha’s reconciliation with the spirit of her missing husband and the physical union that Mumbai’s cramped geography has denied Anu for so long.
While retaining some of the documentary touches of her previous work, Kapadia’s screenplay is rich in shrewd symbolism. But the most important allegory running through the film is the emphasis for solidarity across caste, class and gender lines. Just as A Night of Knowing Nothing paid tribute to the student protests against government interference at the Film and Television Institute of India in 2015, All We Imagine As Light is an elusive yet equally robust call for equality and social justice.
Director, screenwriter: Payal Kapadia
Cast: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon, Azees Nedumangad
Producers: Thomas Hakim, Julien Graff
Cinematography: Ranabir Das
Editor: Clément Pinteaux
Music: Dhritiman Das
Production design: Piyusha Chalke, Yashasvi Sabharwal, Shamim Khan
Sound design: Benjamin Silvestre, Romain Ozanne, Olivier Voisin
Production companies: Petit Chaos, Chalk and Cheese
World sales: Luxbox
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Malayalam, Hindi
114 minutes
