All We Imagine as Light (2024)
In teeming Mumbai, three stalwart Indian women stand up for themselves
Nurse Prahba (Kani Kusruti) on the subway in a vast, overwhelming Mumbai
All We Imagine as Light (2024)
In theaters
Movies can sometimes be works of portraiture, not slices of life but visual captures of people at rest. The camera keeps moving, but the subject is held still.
We first see Prabha (the astonishing Kani Kusruti), a nurse in a busy Mumbai women's hospital, standing perfectly still in a crowded subway. She doesn’t even sway with the motion of the train. We’ll come to realize that she isn’t lost in thought, she’s living in her mind.
Yet she’s open to others. It’s just that we see on her face that some terror or loss has hunted her down and pierced her consciousness like an arrow.
When on the rocking train she finally turns her head to glance aside, so commanding is the actress, we can’t help wondering how other Indian women weigh their futures.
The gesture is small, the inner landscape is in a cataclysm. Writer-director Payal Kapadia has an extraordinary aptitude for finding the enormous in the minute, the soul of a country in the contentions of a handful of people.
With this, her second feature, winner of the 2024 Grand Prize at Cannes, she put me in mind of her countryman, the masterful director Satyajit Ray (1921-1992). Ray shot his movies (The Apu Trilogy, Days and Nights in the Forest) in fine poetic detail, as India’s history flowed, sometimes volcanically, in the background.
Kapadia has a similar eye for the sharp, revealing element, but Indian historicism, the grand sweep of an emerging political colossus, doesn’t seem to guide her. Working with rhapsodic cinematographer Ranabar Das, she does without wide screen panoramas of India in flux.
Three women in crisis stand in for the whole Indian female underclass. Kapadia’s pungent dialogue suggests it’s touchy and bitter down below.
Nurse Prahba grounds the picture. She had an arranged marriage and after weeks her husband left for Germany and hasn't been in touch since. A gleaming red rice cooker arrives in the mail, with no return address.
Nurse Prahba and Anu wonder who might have sent the gleaming rice cooker
Words on the bottom say it’s been manufactured in Germany. To her immense shame, Prabha when she’s alone at night turns the kitchen item into a totem, her longing made manifest.
Her roommate Anu (Divya Prabha) is a pretty, headstrong young woman who bristles at India's traditional marital strictures for women. Her parents insist it's time she found the right Hindu boy to marry.
Her Muslim boyfriend Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon) is besotted with her and, though his parents, too, want him to marry within his religion, he fills Anu with hope that they can find the courage to stand on their own. Prabha warns Anu she’s headed down a dangerous path.
Nurse Prabha’s friend Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is a cook at the hospital and is being evicted from the modest apartment she’s lived in for decades. India’s love of more gleaming skyscrapers brings bulldozers to smash tranquility, leaving a widow like Pavarty with no choice but to cede ground to progress.
Embers of resistance burn in all three women. If ever so faintly in Prahba. Her colleague at the hospital, the earnest Dr. Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), declares his fondness for her, even unashamedly writes her a love poem, but she can’t bring herself to return his affection.
Anu doesn’t fight off the spell Shiaz has put her under. They both want to seal their bond with sex, though maneuvering around watchful parents makes that close to impossible.
She confides to Prabha that she’s terrified her family will chastise and confine her if she tells them about Shiaz, but her longing slowly begins to endow her with courage.
Parvaty has been around long enough to know which battles to fight, and she decides, with a kind of defiant joy, to turn her back on Mumbai’s rampant commercialism and return to her seaside village and start life anew. Exactly how she'll make it, she isn’t sure, perhaps cooking here and there as luck may provide.
The strong bond keeping these three attached to one another pushes the movie out of Mumbai and into the remote fishing village Parvaty will permanently call home again. Prahba and Anu spend a few days helping Parvaty move and settle in.
Not to be outwitted, Shiaz follows them there, refusing to let Anu out of his sight. Partners now in defying tradition, the couple take their first tentative steps toward a connection leading to freedom and marriage. Or so their trembling faces signal. Anxiety creeps into the corners of their eyes.
The most startling turn happens to Prahba. A nearly drowned man (Anand Sami) washes up on the beach, and the trained nurse uses CPR to bring him back to life. Who is he? Or, more vexingly, who could he stand in for?
In reviving him, has Prahba awakened the nearly extinguished woman grieving for a husband she no longer knows? We’re tantalized by the question. The scenes between the two form an elliptical fever dream, a blend of conjecture, vanished hope and embers beginning to cast a growing, stronger light.
Though this story is steeped in Indian culture and norms, and the subcontinent’s sweltering heat, Kapadia as both writer and director sends me to other parts of the globe to explain her transfixing power, the crowning emphasis she places on the individual.
She stages interactions between women with the cool, steely intimacy of an Ingmar Bergman. Yes, she could be said to draw on the gentle torpor and lyricism of the stately Ray. But her style, for all its lushness, is stonier than his.
Her women face stark choices. To illuminate them, Kapadia marshals inchoate feelings of disquiet in them, but, crucially, they’re not overwhelmed. It seems not much “happens”, as in Chekhov. Yet her women can blister with the festering rage of Ibsen. Nora would know them on sight.
This largeness of literary vision frees Kapadia’s camera to barrel through the vastly populated Indian landscape and get to the heart of the suffering individual.
Society, culture, religion be damned. These women are borderless. And Kapadia's profound sympathy, and prodigal filmmaking poise, bends and stretches what we want movies to attempt. Only a master of the craft can make the minute seem to tell us all we need to know.