Director – Payal Kapadia – 2024 – France, India, Luxembourg, Netherlands – Cert. 15 – 118m
*****
The lives, loves and challenges of three women working in a hospital in Mumbai – on UK Blu-ray/DVD (Dual Format Edition) from Monday, March 3rd, on BFI Player from Monday, February 17th, and on iTunes and Amazon Prime from Monday, March 17th
Mumbai. Opening with serial, engrossing tracking shots showing first men working throwing goods onto lorries, then men in traffic riding in the open boot of a car, then people riding on the urban rail system, all to the accompaniment of soundtrack vox pops of men and women talking about their lives and how the city helps you forget, All We Imagine as Light is, among other things, a paean to the city of Mumbai.
On a typical working day in the hospital, Nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti from Girls Will Be Girls, Shuchi Talati, 2024) explains to a doctor why an old lady refuses to take her pills (she’s seeing visions of the torso of her late husband) and opts out of going out to see the latest action blockbuster featuring dreamy male stars with her fellow nurses. She talks about helping with free legal advice to kitchen worker Pavarty (Chhaya Kadam from Sister Midnight, Karan Kandhari, 2024; Laapataa Ladies, Kiran Rao, 2023; Bombay Rose, Gitanjali Rao, 2019) who is having problems with intimidation by thugs to move out of her home.
Meanwhile, Nurse Anu (Divya Prabha from Family, Don Palathara, 2024) is on a reception desk talking to a patient about government incentives for her husband getting a vasectomy (“one thousand rupees and a bucket”) and supplying her with free contraceptive pills. In a break, she twirls in her chair to memorable solo piano music, while superimposed intertitles and voiceover convey her romantic text messages back and forth with boyfriend Shiaz.
In a downpour, a doctor clad in waterproofs walks Nurse Prabha to the shelter of the covered bridge near her rail station. He is struggling with the finer points of Hindi, which she speaks fluently. He gives her a booklet containing a little poem he’s written. (“It’s just a hobby”.) At her modest room in the nurses’ home, she finds the cat outside and discusses it with Anu, her room-mate, who also wants help again covering the monthly rent. An unexpected parcel arrives for Prabha containing a posh rice cooker. From Germany, where her husband lives. Alone, later at night, she sits reading the doctor’s poem.
Next day, a co-worker alerts Prabha to a difficult situation: Anu is seeing a Muslim boy. And, sure enough, we watch as she and Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon) meet up and go for a romantic tryst in an underground car park.
Prabha embraces her new rice cooker, perhaps thinking of her distant husband. Anu and boyfriend get caught in another downpour whilst necking in the park. At night, Prahha tries to ring her husband, but fails to get hold of him on the phone.
The two room-mates get Prabha’s doctor friend, Dr. Manoj (Azeez Nedumangad), to run a scan on their pregnant cat, and discover it to be carrying four babies!
Shiaz tells Anu to get a burqua so she can visit his house while “uncle and auntie” are away. “I feel like a spy in a movie”, texts Anu prior to entering a burqua shop. This contrasts with a talk with Prabha, where the latter tells Anu about her unsatisfactory arranged marriage.
Pavarty eventually gives up her fight and decides to go home to her village, as there’s work there and at least she’ll have a home. She and Prabha attend a radical left-wing meeting about the housing situation. Afterwards, they go for a meal at a restaurant Parvaty has never dared to visit, then go and throw rocks at a billboard advertising the unaffordable housing development of Zeus Towers set to replace Parvaty’s home. Later, Prahba runs into her doctor to learn that his contract is ending soon. They go to a nearby park and sit on the swings to talk. He wants to know if there’s any hope for him, any reason he should stay in Mumbai. She makes her excuses.
Prabha and Anu accompany Parvaty by train to her village. All three sip from a bottle of whisky that Anu found in Parvarty’s luggage; Anu maskes her excuses as the other two head for the sea, but Prabha later spots her in a jungle clearing embracing Shiaz. Later, Au sneaks out of Pararty’s house when she thinks Prabha is asleep, but Prabha isn’t. She meets Shiaz in a cave.
Prabha rescues a man apparently drowned using E.A.R. The local doctor thinks he’s her husband, and then, alone with him, Prabha talks with him as if he were. Somehow, the experience helps her reconcile to her own situation with the arranged marriage, and with the situation of Anu and her boyfriend.
There is something utterly magical about this film, which has a similar feel to the films of Wong Kar-wai. Like him, Payal Kapadia possesses that rare ability to set something up with an actor or two, observe with her camera and allow something to happen before the lens. All We Imagine as light is full of marvellous little, visual moments: a group of off-duty nurses watching a movie, a nurse phoning her mum as she changes at her locker after work, people travelling on Mubai’s various transport systems. Some of it, such as the opening, constitutes pure documentary; much of it brings in actors, yet somehow retains that quality of documentary verisimilitude.
At the core of the piece are the three very different women: the older, wiser Prabha, the younger, more impetuous Anu, and the fatally resigned Pavarty. The first half, with its two nurses and a cook, might be set in any health service in the world; in a very real sense, the specifics of Mumbai transcend it to evoke any city anywhere, although it’s still Mumbai.
Similarly with the three women, even though they are trapped by social convention in the form of arranged marriage, religious division in terms of India’s Hindu and Muslim populations, and economic necessity in the form of unscrupulous developers and builders. The specifics might not happen absolutely anywhere, but in more general terms, they could do so.
“Some people call this the city of dreams,” says a vox pop as a Hindu religious procession passes on the screen about mid-way through, “but I don’t. I call it the city of illusions.”
This is as good a demonstration as I can recall of the power of cinema to take you inside a totally alien culture and make you live and breathe it as if it were your own. Its pacing is peculiar… as it progresses, in its last half hour, its proceedings seem to slow right down as it gets under the very essence of things. Altogether, a remarkable piece of work.
All We Imagine as Lightis out on Blu-ray/DVD (Dual Format Edition) in the UK on Monday, March 3rd, on BFI Player from Monday, February 17th, and on iTunes and Amazon Prime from Monday, March 17th following its UK cinema release on Friday, November 29th 2024.
The UK Blu-ray/DVD (Dual Format Edition) includes two early shorts by the director:
Afternoon Clouds (2017)
What is Summer Saying? (2018)
Trailer: