‘All We Imagine as Light’ May Be the Most Moving Film of the Year

Early in All We Imagine as Light, Anu (Divya Prabha) asks her boyfriend Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon) to send her kisses through the clouds so that when it rains, they reach her lips. The frequent precipitation in Mumbai, however, resonates primarily as tears in Payal Kapadia’s stunning feature, a portrait of female loneliness, longing, and suffering that derives its power from its subtle lyricism and heartfelt empathy. A quiet tale of three women’s ordeals in a modern society that constrains them in ways both overt and understated, this festival standout—winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival—resounds like a lament and concludes, tenderly, with an upbeat sigh.

Over snapshots of throngs moving around the city at night, All We Imagine as Light, in theaters Nov. 15, presents the voices of Mumbai inhabitants discussing their feelings about the metropolis for which they left their small villages.

According to one unnamed speaker, money and food are the main reasons these transplants have arrived in India’s financial capital, but there’s little joy in their comments, just as there’s almost none in the countenance of Prabha (Kani Kusruti), who works as a nurse at a hospital alongside her colleague Anu, with whom she also shares a flat. Prabha is a somber woman who’s introduced reporting on a patient for not taking her medication. That senior citizen’s hallucinations about her dead husband mark her as a kindred spirit to her caretaker, insofar as Prabha is married and yet hasn’t seen her spouse since shortly after their wedding day because he promptly left to work in a German factory and has more or less stopped communicating with her.

Prabha’s face exudes pent-up desolation, whereas Anu is far more vivacious, spinning on her desk chair as she texts with her beau and informs a 25-year-old mother of three that she can earn 1,000 rupees from the government by convincing her husband to get a vasectomy. All We Imagine as Light spies women silently struggling to endure in a country that constrains them at every turn, limiting their freedom and, with it, their opportunities for happiness.

For Prabha, that means existing in perpetual limbo, incapable of being with the husband she wants and prevented from entertaining the advances of a doctor, Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), who has eyes for her. Anu, meanwhile, is compelled by her parents’ (and others’) prejudices to keep her budding romance with Shiaz, a Muslim, secret—a state of affairs that requires sneaking around and, consequently, earns her a reputation amongst her peers as a “slut.”

None of this is fair but All We Imagine as Light presents it as par for the course for women navigating Mumbai, and that additionally goes for Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), the hospital’s cook and Prabha’s friend, who’s about to be kicked out her home by a developer intent on knocking down her complex to erect a luxury high-rise. Prabha gets Parvaty a meeting with a lawyer to address this situation, only for the two of them to learn that because Parvaty’s husband is deceased and she has no paperwork proving that she lives in her residence, she’s helpless to halt her eviction. Together, Kapadia’s protagonists are a trio bonded by their powerlessness and anguish, both of which conspire to thwart their dreams for a brighter tomorrow.

Kapadia’s handheld cinematography (courtesy of Ranabir Das) is deeply attuned to its subjects, whether it’s bobbing, swaying, and gliding alongside Anu and Parvaty as they dance together following a few sips of booze, or remaining static during close-ups of the forlorn Prabha. All We Imagine as Light’s aesthetics are graceful and understated, including Topshe’s score of aching acoustic guitar and, more commonly, delicate, mournful, and cascading piano. The film conveys an innate impression of Prabha, Anu, and Parvaty’s interior lives and boasts a lived-in feel for its milieu, with nighttime panoramas of Mumbai’s glittering building and bustling streets contributing to the material’s low-key mixture of hope and despondency, pleasure and pain.

Out of the blue, Prabha receives a package at her doorstep and discovers that it’s a rice cooker made in Germany—a present, ostensibly, from her wayward partner. Anu is delighted by this gift, yet it merely exacerbates Prabha’s misery, some of which seems, however faintly, to be colored by the self-recriminating thought that she’s responsible for her own abandonment. Kapadia’s script is too deft to overtly spell out such a notion, just as it doesn’t underline the fact that Prabha and Anu’s pregnant cat—who receives an ultrasound from the feline-phobic Manoj—is one more Mumbai female fated to fend for herself and her brood without the aid of a male companion. The writer/director wastes not a single gesture nor makes one misstep during the course of All We Imagine as Light, evoking her characters’ individual and intertwined turmoil with unshowy elegance and incisive touches.

From a quick shot of Parvaty stuffing a small, wrapped package of snacks into her bra, to brief cutaways to crowded downtown traffic and roaming rural chickens, the film has an acute sense of time, place, and the religious and cultural pressures bearing down on Prabha, Anu, and Parvaty.

The yearning to achieve some sort of content future drives Anu to don a burqa and Prabha to listen to Manoj’s timid proposition, and for Parvaty, it means giving up on her legal battle and retreating to her hometown, a tiny village where her house lacks electricity. It’s there that Kapadia’s three women grapple with their aspirations in their own desperate, distressed manners—a process that entails confronting their alternately realistic and unattainable objects of desire.

There’s so much sadness in All We Imagine as Light that it’s a borderline miracle Kapadia manages to wring a measure of optimism from her tale. In its closing chapters, the film wholly immerses itself in Prabha’s headspace, comprehending not simply her grief but the means by which accepting it affords her a way forward. Moreover, with a final scene around a table beneath the bright lights of a beachside shack and, above them, a sky full of twinkling stars, it recognizes and celebrates solidarity as the ultimate bulwark against subjugation, alienation, and despair.