A soft, shimmering beauty permeates the images of Mumbai that open Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light. For all the nighttime bustle on display — the heave of people, the constant activity and chaos — Kapadia shoots with a flair for the illusory. The camera drifts, the focus slips, the figures shift; everything onscreen feels fragile and impermanent. We don’t immediately hear the din of traffic or the roar of crowds as we might in a straightforward documentary. Rather, the sound is so sparse and quiet it’s as if we’re watching a ghost world. Occasionally, voices do waft in, unseen and unnamed, each speaking in a different language about Mumbai. One man tells us he has lived in the city for 23 years but is still afraid to call it home. Another tells us he came here after fighting with his father. A woman explains that she was pregnant but was scared to tell anybody because she’d found a good job taking care of someone else’s children. There have been city symphonies in cinema before, but Kapadia’s film is altogether more pensive and intimate. Call it a city nocturne or a city whisper.
Despite such sequences, All We Imagine As Light, which won the Grand Prix earlier this year at Cannes—and was the first Indian feature to play in competition at the festival in 30 years—is not a documentary at all. With the same roving ease, the director gradually settles on her three protagonists, all of them women working at a hospital. Head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and her younger colleague Anu (Divya Prabha) room together in a tiny flat, while the older cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is facing eviction from the tenement she has lived in for more than two decades. Without contrivance or overdramatization, Kapadia allows these characters’ stories to trickle into our consciousness. Prabha’s husband, we learn, went off to work in Germany years ago and hasn’t been heard from; a doctor at the hospital seems intent on wooing her, but she doesn’t know where she stands in the world. Anu is in love with a young Muslim man, and the two must meet surreptitiously. At one point, he tells her that the aunt and uncle he lives with are going away for the weekend and that she should buy a burka to come visit him covertly; their romance is a forbidden one. Parvaty, meanwhile, has no documented proof of her residence. She had moved into the small apartment with her late husband, who worked in a nearby mill, but now a luxury condo is going up and the builders are sending goons to force her to leave. In so many ways, these women’s worlds are circumscribed by the men in their lives—even when the men are no longer there.
For all this simmering turmoil — Prabha’s loneliness, Anu’s passion, Parvaty’s desperation — the performances remain hushed and unassuming, at least on the surface. Kusruti, who was also riveting in Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls, has the kind of eyes that can speak volumes, but her Prabha may be the most composed of these characters. When a fancy new rice cooker from Germany arrives mysteriously in the mail, she and Anu assume it came from Prabha’s husband. Later, in a surreal moment that would be funny if it weren’t so heartbreaking, she secretly embraces the rice cooker, trying to commune emotionally with this gleaming red object that may be all that’s left of her marriage.
There’s meaning to be found in the unease between what’s happening in these people’s lives and the film’s wandering tone. Piano arpeggios drift in on the soundtrack, suggesting something lighter and more accepting even as the music flirts with atonality. It’s all part of the troubling essence of this place. “Some people call this the city of dreams, but I don’t. I think it’s the city of illusions,†intones one of the many unidentified voices on the soundtrack. “There’s an unspoken code in this city: Even if you live in the gutter, you’re allowed to feel no anger,†says another. The Mumbai here is a place where everyone comes and nobody feels at home. Which in turn means nobody has the room to claim a better life.
That may be why, when our three protagonists leave the city in the final act and land in a small coastal town, a transformation takes place. It’s as if a dam has opened up, and these women, whose lives were so submerged for so long, have found a sense of space and thus some ability to shape the things around them, even in fantastical ways. Now, a reality that seemed forever on the verge of dissolving tips into something resembling magical realism. And through her mesmerizing filmmaking, Kapadia creates a world that didn’t seem possible — which, of course, reinforces how imaginary this new place might prove to be. The film may end on notes of joy, but what lingers is more sadness.