The beauty of Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (which deservedly won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year) is that it teems with meaning and history in every frame, lensing a cosmopolitan Mumbai where women can work self-sufficiently and freely (here, as hospital nurses), but who are yet still tied to forces beyond their control. For Prabha (Kani Kusruti), it is to an absentee husband, who left for better work in Germany and gradually stopped keeping in touch—until she receives his gift of a rice cooker one day, the first sign of attention he’s paid to her in years, which draws her emotions taut and her resentment triggered like a tiny bomb, especially because she cannot return the advances of a poetry-writing colleague due to her married status.
Meanwhile, for her roommate and co-worker Anu (Divya Prabha), marriage to her Muslim boyfriend seems like a longshot in a religiously conservative country where traditions are upheld above all else. Still, she loves him freely and will do whatever it takes to be with him—even donning a burka so she can go to his house when his family is away at a wedding. Kapadia probes her country’s sociopolitical situation even further with Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), Prabha’s friend at the hospital, who is being evicted from her home by heartless developers because she doesn’t have papers from her late mill worker husband to prove she has a legal claim to remain.
The sights and sounds, promises and treacheries, humidity and rain of Mumbai are spun into a gorgeous tapestry wherein the characters are foregrounded. But just when you begin to get comfortable, Kapadia has one last surprise up her sleeve when she decides to abandon the city and move the coda of her film to the coastal region of Ratnagiri, where concrete and automobile is replaced by sea and forest foliage. It is a return of sorts (particularly for Parvaty, who ultimately gives up fighting for her city home), and an awakening for Prabha and Anu, who accompany her. With an aura that feels like a magic-realistic healing tincture to dissolve the fragments of quiet oppressiveness that besieged the characters earlier on, it is with this luscious, enigmatic grace note that Kapadia’s intentions unfurl to an exquisite climax as the bond between Prabha and Anu is finally anchored, and a timeless portrait of two women drawn close together out of both necessity and empathy is given its final, triumphant burnish.
All We Imagine as Light had its Canadian premiere at TIFF in the Special Presentations programme on September 11, 2024.
The Lonely Film Critic 