There is a moment in All We Imagine as Light when a nurse impulsively places a stethoscope to her own chest. In a sense, that is the aim of this beautifully attuned movie: to examine the inner emotional workings of its characters, listening intently—but not intrusively—for the beating of their hearts.
Written and directed by Payal Kapadia, All We Imagine as Light centers around two roommates in contemporary Mumbai: Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a middle-aged nursing supervisor in the women’s health department of a hospital, and Anu (Divya Prabha), a younger nurse who also works there. (The bodily implications of being a woman are all over the film, from a scene in which Prabha demonstrates how to dispose of a placenta to the fact that she and Anu share a cat who becomes pregnant.) Over the course of the movie, Prabha and Anu negotiate their life together, particularly how it is affected by the men in their lives: Prabha’s husband, who migrated to Germany for work years ago, and Anu’s boyfriend, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), whose Muslim background keeps them from being a public couple.
Both performances are sublime, each heart-melting in its own distinct way. Kusruti has a tender moment with a rice cooker that tells you all about the years of loneliness she’s endured. Prabha has a coy smile that emerges when Shiaz suggests she don a burqa in order to visit his neighborhood, then she shifts into defiant despair when the plan unravels. (Kapadia stages things so that a train angrily races past Anu the moment she rips off the garment.) All We Imagine as Light throbs with yearning and disappointment, immersing us in a cityscape in which every passing car or trolley seems to hold someone heading toward someone else, while we sit alone.
Kapadia’s Mumbai, introduced in a montage of residents commenting on their city via voicever, registers as an overwhelming place with occasional bursts of beauty. (And rain, so much rain.) Working with cinematographer Ranabir Das, she finds and accentuates colors in nearly every corner, such as an establishing shot of nurses running to gather pink and blue sheets in the rain. Then, just when you’re satisfied with the visual feast the movie has delivered, it shifts locales for its final third, traveling (for reasons I won’t spoil) to a seaside village that modernity has seemingly left behind.
It’s here that a ghostly element is introduced, launching All We Imagine as Light into the artistic stratosphere. If the first section of the film brought to mind a mid-century masterwork like Satyajit Ray’s The Big City, in which a Calcutta housewife enters the workforce for economic reasons, this finale recalls more transcendentally inclined recent movies like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Mati Diop’s Atlantics, and Victor Erice’s Close Your Eyes (the latter film being another international standout from 2024). All We Imagine as Light proves Kapadia to be a filmmaker able to draw a piercingly exquisite pain from her particular cultural context, while also transporting us far beyond it.
(12/17/2024)
