A deeply tender narrative finds illumination in stillness.
There is something profound and alluring about All We Imagine as Light. Payal Kapadia’s debut foray into feature-length fiction took home the Grand Prix at Cannes in May, and it is undeniably stunning. The film’s emotional residue is indelible and lustrous – after leaving the Hamptons International Film Festival’s weekend screening of the Indian drama, I felt the distinct warmth of emotional lucidity that can only result from an encounter with great art. Such are the powers of cinema when it commands the heights of mood, texture, and color; riding a subtle spatial rhythm where characters and setting converge in a confluence of harmonious augmentation.
Mumbai takes center stage as both character and muse for the visual and material conditions by which the film’s characters stake their claim to grief, friendship, sorrow, and desire. These characters, each grappling with various symptoms of modern urbanity’s tendency towards anomie, take the form of three nurses – Prabha, Anu, and Parvaty. Distinct in temperament and disposition, they share a bond as economic migrants and relative strangers in the country’s boundless cosmopolis, hailing from villages far beyond the city’s accelerating outward sprawl. Parvaty is obstinate in the face of gentrification-induced displacement, facing down a mildly thuggish developer who seeks to replenish her apartment building with an upwardly mobile managerial class (and caste). Roommates Prabha and Anu are a quiet contrast – a self-possessed and stoic Prabha mourns the ambiguous, faulty trajectory of her long distance marriage; Anu courts scandal in her love for Shiaz, a local muslim boy also teetering on the edge of transgressive desire.
A lesser film would make a mess of these ingredients, tending towards the overwrought, intrusive, and melodramatic. But here Kapadia exerts restraint and patience, filling emotional space with furtive glances, subtle gestures, and a dripping languor. In an early scene, Prabha receives a package from abroad, the provenance of which is likely her husband, an absent figure who left India to find work in Germany. The gift is a rice cooker – and perhaps a nod to Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum, and in turn, Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring; each film having deployed the device as a kind of talismanic interplay between love, utility, and impermanence. In Prabha’s case, the cherry red rice cooker acts as a material acknowledgement of an irreparable dislocation, and in a gesturally expressive later scene, a tomb for the young nurse’s forlorn and unattended desire.
These are the small moments of All We Imagine that reveal an expanse of atmosphere and emotion both within its characters and beyond them, floating across the surface of the film’s sensual, intimate photography. In the foreground, something unspoken permeates the interactions between the women and their environs, as the city’s infrastructural confines quietly reverberate with their confessions, pronouncements, and hopes – the actualization of which remains elusive and forestalled. Train cars and buses host missed connections, a concrete skybridge paves a footpath for romance unrequited. It is not until Parvaty acquiesces to a literal form of dislocation – abandoning her apartment at the behest of the developer – that the film arrives at emancipation, as Anu and Prabha accompany her on the journey home. Once there, the lush seaside village prompts revelations both spiritual and of the flesh, marked by an incredible sequence of transcendent, almost imperceptible hallucination. This is one of the most beautiful films of the year.
