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ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT ★★★★
(M) 118 minutes
Much of the action in this Cannes Grand Prix winner is set in Mumbai. It opens at the city’s central station among the surging crowds at morning peak hour, which is terrifying, especially if you’ve been there. But the camera keeps its cool, scanning the faces of the commuters as their voices form the narration, catching the pounding pulse of the city with vignettes from their daily lives.
Kani Kusruti (left) and Divya Prabha play housemates in the award-winning All We Imagine As Light.
We finally settle on Prabha (Kani Kusruti), who is en route to her job as a nurse in the maternity ward of a busy hospital, and a single close-up serves as a remarkably eloquent introduction. She has a grave, knowing look that speaks of illusions abandoned and compromises made about the direction in which the passing years are taking her.
At the hospital, we watch as she deals calmly and kindly with a difficulty patient and offers to help her friend, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a cleaner, who’s being forced out of her home by a big development company. And at the end of the day, we go home with her to the tiny flat she shares with Anu (Divya Prabha), a younger and more outgoing nurse whose not-so-secret affair with a Muslim boy is shaping up as one of the film’s main themes.
All We Imagine as Light, starring Kani Kusruti as a nurse called Prabha, gives us intimate tales about women.
Writer-director Payal Kapadia is a documentary maker. This is her first work of fiction and it reflects her fondness for weaving a link between the personal and the political. She doesn’t press home the point. Her characters don’t have the taint of case studies, worth considering only because of what they tell us about modern India. She’s giving us intimate tales about women she clearly regards with great affection. But she doesn’t crowd them. The story unfolds in a cinéma vérité style that invites us to pick up clues as we go.
When a rice cooker is delivered to Prabha’s apartment with no note, we learn she has a husband working in Germany. She has not heard from him for a year or more and, at first, she ignores the gift. It’s only later when she opens the package again, hugging it to her, that we get a hint as to how much she cares about his disappearance from her life.
Nor do she and Anu talk about the Muslim boy. She finds out about the romance only when another nurse tells her it’s become the talk of the hospital.