All We Imagine as Light Is a Poetic Glimpse at Urban Dispossession in Modern Mumbai

The film opens with voiceover extracts of Mumbaikars who struggled to find their place in the challenging city; this framing device primes us to notice the ways the city invades the characters’ personal problems. Prabha’s suppressed longing for her estranged husband comes into sharp focus when a German-made rice cooker is delivered to her and Anu’s apartment – a material object attempting to substitute true, deeply felt affection. As there’s no message or even signature attached to the expensive gift, we ponder the depressing truth that it is easier to send your wife an appliance than make her feel loved. The reality of economic migrancy stifles any meaningful loving expression, but Prabha’s husband may be relying on this communicative ambiguity to enforce the distance between them.

It’s an emotional state that is touched on often in Kapadia’s film; characters are fixed in stasis by forces outside their control, but must be in motion to keep up with a metropolis outpacing them. The camera hones in on commuters on footbridges, bustling together in train carriages, and pushing toward station exits – only for impersonal objects to remind them of the emotional ties keeping them still. Is it a rice cooker, or a mooring anchor?

Elsewhere, Pavarty doesn’t possess the adequate documents to prove her citizenship, and thus not be turfed out of her home. When the rights of buildings hold water over the rights of their occupants, all they can do is stand witness to taller and costlier towers stretching further into the sky – in cinematographer Ranabir Das’ hands, the scale and vibrancy of the city in All We Imagine as Light feels truly humbling.

Pavarty wonders aloud if Mumbai capitalists think “one day they can replace God” – one of many lines that aim for an abrupt, direct poignancy that, in less sophisticated hands than Kapadia’s, could upset the film’s lyrical, carefully observed mood. Thankfully, these lines avoid snapping us out of the gentle immersion because they are so unsubtly poetic – dialogue like this feels like bursts of sincere beauty and emotion breaking free of a smothering cloud of ennui and disaffection for a sentence at a time.

As the youngest of the trio, Anu’s relationship mirrors her flatmate’s romantic neglect – her and Shiaz use the anonymity of Mumbai stations, marketplaces, and parking garages to hide their affection and perform as people allowed to love. If absence has a physical, rice-cooker-sized weight, then so does desire – she yearns not just for stolen amorous moments, but for certainty that no lover will have to compromise to live freely. Sometimes, Prabha takes the role of scolding older sister to Anu, reprimanding her when she comes home late or flirts at work. Enforcing arbitrary divisions like these makes Prabha feel more secure about their own unfixed position in the world, especially as a doctor at the hospital, Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), starts to make advances on the abandoned wife.

Although these absences and desires rely on inaction, Kapadia doesn’t let stasis claim victory on her characters. As the film pushes on, the dark, dank city gives way to the bright, harsh lights of Pavarty’s coastal home, where Prabha and Anu face their deepest, most intimate impasses. Kapadia aims for transcendence here and lands it – most notably when tending to a near-drowning victim that a local mistakes for her husband. What follows is a conversation defined by impossibility, expressed in shots of the back of heads and confessions tinged with longing and the immaterial. It’s bold to attempt the emotional climax of Paris, Texas in your second film, bolder still to pull it off. The less said about the delicate, transient final scene, the better, but Kapadia caps off the film’s rush of catharsis with an image of self-defined unity that feels like it can move mountains.

Three days after All We Imagine as Light had its world premiere at Cannes, the film was awarded the Grand Prix by the jury – the festival’s most prestigious prize after the Palme d’Or. It was not selected by India’s Oscar committee as the country’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Film, in no small part due the filmmaker’s incendiary previous film A Night of Knowing Nothing. Kapadia’s debut feature suffused black-and-white documentary footage with yearning voiceover; the film charts real university students protesting caste oppression, while “L,” whose boyfriend dropped out of her school and belongs to a different caste, writes one-sided love letters of heartbreak and becoming.

The film lays bare some of the violence of Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, and marked Kapadia out as a decisively political filmmaker, but her second film is less interested in long, patient scenes of students organizing and demonstrating. Instead, Kapadia continues to map out how the political entwines with the personal on a subdermal level, shaping the ways Indian women imagine themselves in relation to labor, capital, and physical spaces. All We Imagine as Light is both admirably restrained and deliberately poetic, painting its constrained women with nuance and empathy, before they light up a narrow path out of liminality.

Director: Payal Kapadia
Writer: Payal Kapadia
Stars: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon
Release date: Nov. 15, 2024

Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.