India, France, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, 2024
Directed by Payal Kapadia
With Kani Kusruti (Prabha), Divya Prabha (Anu), Chhaya Kadam (Parvaty), Hridhu Haroon (Shiaz)
Framing smartly the narrative’s first part, documentary-like pictures of the bustling streets and arteries of Mumbai shot by night capture how much the city is a crowd, teeming and tireless, a forbidding stream of faces and bodies apparently enjoying the city life but clearly in the harshest terms. Those terms are actually spelled out by the voice-overs, snippets of first-person accounts from people who have settled in the great hub of the Maharashtra state and share their experiences, or more exactly their disappointments and their criticism, sour vocal counterpoints (they do not appear onscreen), to the dynamism the city so eagerly and conspicuously display. One female voice in the second string of gritty images would sum it up well: Mumbai is just a city of illusions – life has a delusional quality based on hypocrite rules.
Not everything happens by night in the story, but those images nevertheless set up the palette of this first part: it is shot in a dim lighting with dark hues. The atmosphere is sober: nothing usually shines or glows, while blue is a dominant color, though it is dulled and partly linked with the job of the two lead female characters, who are nurses in a general hospital, wearing blue uniforms – and the color even features, though discreetly, in the apartment where they are roommates.
But bright touches of vivid colors associated with very modern and practical equipment signal something is stirring the lives of Prabha and Anu. Orange words floating on the screen convey the messages Anu and her lover send to each other over their mobile phones while Prabha receives a magnificent red rice cooker from Germany, the first thing she got from her husband for years, long after he left India seeking better incomes only to vanish. Both migrants from Kerala, these two women, Prabha near her forties, strict, reserved, sad, Anu young, ebullient, foolish, and radiant, must grapple with strong sentiments and a relationship on the brink – if Prabha’s husband is out of reach physically, Shiaz, Anu’s boyfriend, is very much present but should keep his distances socially speaking, enough to dampen the lovers’ happiness, as he is a Muslim while she is Hindu, a difference which sets the tongues wagging in the hospital, to Prabha’s displeasure.
Complicating the melancholy Prabha feels is the awkward but sincere courting of a doctor from another state: the episode hints at a conventional melodramatic tension, centered on Prabha’s ability to forget about the vanished lover and instead to embrace the new one, with doubt and guilt tipping dangerously the scales to the detriment of the gentle doctor. This plot plays out in a subdued, delicate way but it does not take center stage very often, the film chronicling more readily and vividly the friendship between Prabha and an older colleague, Parvaty, who is threatened to be evicted from her home by the greed of a big real estate company. In this first part, “All We Imagine as Light” is not just about romance: it paints a wider picture of the city where the nurses help to deliver babies and look after oldies. And it turns out to be heartbreaking and melancholy, the fiction matching perfectly, alas, the documentary voices. It is exquisitely sensitive and smart, alluding to many fault lines, frustrations, failures without laboring the point but just by watching how the characters try to navigate, pointing to just enough detail to be realistic and let the audience gather the complexity of a situation and quietly scrutinizing the people with a moving sympathy.
A big surprise comes after Parvaty decides to give up the fight and move back to her native countryside, in the Ratnagiri area, with Prabha and, a bit unexpectedly, Anu accompanying her. Out of the blue, shadows and darkness recede and a wonderful light fills the screen, often high key, but also softer in some scenes, and always pervasive. The sea is part of the quiet scenery as much as the forest: this is a wide and magical natural world where a small community lives and where the nurses enjoy life more freely and cheerfully.
Yet the theme of romantic feelings under strain and challenging the women lingers, though it leads in this new background to a new set of intenser and stranger images, as if a wild environment was needed to delve deeper in the emotions and to reach a kind of climax and turning point that the illusions of Mumbai make it impossible to experience. For Anu, it would be beguiling frolicking through woods and caves and eventually an unforgettable carnal encounter with Shiaz who has secretly followed her. For Prabha, it would an odd meeting, a man who nearly drowned at sea, a perfect stranger in the eyes of the locals: she resuscitates him and nurses him before feeling he may be the ghost of the missing husband. It would also, for Prabha, be the acceptance that Anu has the affair that was the topic of gossips, the elder at first viewing the relation only as a danger, perhaps out of too much care for Anu, or out of her own unhappiness.
Director Payal Kapadia has rarely used wide shots, often reserved for the high-powered shots on the big Mumbai markets. But her last shot is a remarkable wide shot, featuring at the composition’s center at a great distance, sat around a table at a small and plain café, Parvaty, Prabha, Anu, and Shiaz, chatting joyfully, with the young man waiting to them playing the fool behind their backs, at the heart of a long, dark, warm evening. The film thus ends in part like it began, with nocturnal images of lively folks – but there is no bitter comment, only a nice music, there is no crowd, only a small group of friend, there is no expectation, only a peaceful sense of closure as this quartet of characters seem to have found after the hectic life of the big city and the tranquil and inviting poetry of the nice seaside a respite, or a comfort, or just more self-confidence.
What happened between the beginning and the end is a stunning shift from melancholy to grace, from alienation to sensuality, from chaos to serenity, a trip standing as the necessary and rewarding experience allowing Prabha to come to terms with grief and confusion and Anu and Shiaz to assert their love over society, while Parvaty makes her own fresh start. But if the cinematography is vibrant the telling remains subdued: it is a matter of light and darkness from where sentiments pulse but rarely outburst. In this debut fictional feature, emotion is not really muted, it is simply not loudly, predictably, articulated, and it is the quiet observation of faces, awkward silences, poetic images that convey the intensity, the despair, the anger, the doubt, the hope. This groundbreaking Payal Kapadia film pointedly refuses to ignore how the big city, the modern life, the social rules can be delusional, deceitful, destructive but reckons that a community of hearts and souls can be built, in their own terms and at their own pace.