All We Imagine As Light (2024)
All we imagined it, and more
Fiction has the power to inspire, to liberate, to heal, to satiate, to make us feel joy … and a million shades of human emotional experience. Poetry can do some of that too, while stunning you with its beauty, its barebone form, its mesmerizing rhythms, its quiet poise, but above all, its confidence in its own economy of representation. Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light is all that (a friend, who I watched it with, said: “I didn’t expect it to be so poetic” — one of the biggest compliments you can pay to an art form that’s not poetry), and more.
First Half: A Strange Love Letter to Mumbai
The movie is split across the interval in two different places. The entirety of the first half is shot in Mumbai — not the Mumbai we’re used to seeing in modern Bollywood, but the Mumbai of the common people, the outsiders struggling with it or falling in love with it, or just getting so used to it that they think they can’t live anywhere else, the Mumbai of habit, of necessity or compulsion. The Mumbai that offers anonymity to those who would rather not be named, and a shelter — however unsavory — to those with no place to go. The camera work in this half is intimate, as it follows the characters in cramped spaces, and the usual symbols of Mumbai life: the streets and markets, the local trains (you literally feel you’re standing in the door looking out at the passing landmarks, or peeping into the privacy-less lives of people sitting in the compartment, thanks to the brilliant camera work). It doesn’t try to judge Mumbai, nor does it try to tom-tom its much-touted “spirit”. It just makes us look at it, and lets us in into the lives of its three principal characters. All women. All of different ages, and different temperaments, with vastly different stories.
Prabha, the main protagonist, is a Nurse, just like Anu — both from the state of Kerala and living together in a cramped little place as roommates. Prabha is older, and technically married, but almost abandoned by her husband, who works and lives in Germany. Anu, whose parents are trying to get her married off, is in love with a Muslim young man, but hiding it from the world and her roommate, who is like an elder sister to her. Parvati, a cook/helper in the hospital where Prabha and Anu work, is a widow who is living alone, and is about to lose her kholi (room) that her husband had got as compensation when he was let go from a job in a mill, but without any documents to support it, is the oldest of the three.
When Parvati decides to go back to her village in coastal Maharashtra, Prabha and Anu accompany her to help out with her move. The movie cuts into the interval as they reach there.
Second Half: Breaking Free
The second half, set in the coastal village, is shot more dreamlike, in contrast to the stark, almost crushing, reality of urban life. The camera finds its range as if liberated from the cramped urban spaces. Without giving too much away, what Payal Kapadia has done with her characters and material here is nothing short of stunning in its ingenuity. One is almost baffled for a while, till one gets it — the symbolism of it, the sheer brilliance of it. It takes a master filmmaker to manage that. And Payal Kapadia has shown beyond a reasonable doubt that she’s one.
Shot in Ratnagiri, this half is about resolution. The backdrop of the sea and a laid-back, quaint town seem to allow the characters a mind space for that. It is both unhurried and surreal. There are moments of genuine joy, as Anu and Parvati, intoxicated on an old bottle of Whiskey, dance with abandon on a famous old Bollywood number, as the ever contemplative Prabha looks on amused. There are moments of love, emotional catharsis, finding personal truths, and closure.
A Poem, A Story, and a Symphony
The film is both poetry and literature, making us see its beauty in its form, its treatment, its pacing, its palette, and helping us see the inner lives of these three women, the nuances of their interactions with each other and the other characters, the unintrusive smattering of humor coming from dialogs not meant to be ostensibly funny, and the measured poignancy of it it all. One walks out fully satiated, and yet hungry for another watch, knowing one has missed a lot.
A word about the music: the film uses the genre-bending Ethiopian nun and composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’s mesmerizing piano pieces, and they, like everything with the movie, just work in starkly different contexts, effortlessly, almost magically. And on a meta-level, the film is also like a symphony in its structure, progression, and climax.
Conclusion
All We Imagine As Light is a layered, nuanced, narratively brilliant film. The direction is impeccable. The performances are uniformly excellent, but Kani Kusruti (as Prabha) manages to shine brighter, with one of the most nuanced and underplayed performances I’ve seen, her face a canvas capable of emphasizing the subtlest shades of human emotions. Chhaya Kadam (of Laapata Ladies fame, now) as Parvati impresses again, while Divya Prabha (as Anu) manages to hold her own alongside both of these brilliant performances.
Like any piece of great literature, All We Imagine … doesn’t try to spoon-feed us neither with its story nor with its subtle politics. It leaves us to interpret its resolution, and its political posture, and to imagine the course of the lives of its women protagonists while giving us enough to feel like we can.
Do watch it in the theaters if you get a chance.
That's high praise indeed! Will try to check it out if I can.