In a 2017 interview, director Payal Kapadia observed, "One does not need to look too far for inspiration because the life that surrounds us is full of poetic possibilities including dreams and memories." This artistic philosophy was on display in her first feature, the documentary "A Night of Knowing Nothing," and it's even more explicit in "All We Imagine as Light," a narrative feature about three women in Mumbai struggling to make things work, whatever that might look like. The film's evocative title (Kapadia is gifted with those) actually describes the experience of watching it, how the nocturnal insomniac mood is sparked with distant colored lights, and how moving into the light requires "imagining." Perhaps the light isn't light, but it's good enough if we imagine it so.
Loneliness is the real subject, and emotional/geographical dislocation, all of the characters having come from elsewhere: Mumbai is a crowded polyglot city of transplants. The film opens before sunrise with a lengthy panning shot of people setting up small sidewalk markets, unloading produce and other goods off of trucks, the city already wide awake. Everything is movement: cars, crowds, trains. People speak in voiceover, establishing Mumbai - its Edward-Hopper-esque urban loneliness, as the movie's real subject. "There's always the feeling I'll have to leave." "In Mumbai, there is work and money." Living in Mumbai one must "get used to impermanence." This lengthy documentary-style opening ends with a lingering shot on Prabha (Kani Kusruti), standing in the train on her way to work. She is totally still, the first still thing we've seen.
Prabha is a nurse at a busy hospital and somewhat separate from her female colleagues: they invite her to their film nights and get-togethers even though they know she will say no. Prabha had an arranged marriage, and her husband left for Germany shortly after the wedding. Prabha hasn't heard from him since. A rice cooker is sent to her apartment anonymously and postmarked to Germany. It is the only evidence he ever existed. In a breath-taking moment, Prabha sits with the rice cooker on the floor, embracing it passionately. Prabha is not an expressive woman; her heart is deeply hidden from others, so this moment, filled with pain and longing, clarifies her public reserve.
Prabha's roommate Anu (Divya Prabha) is young and restless, secretly meeting up at night with her Muslim boyfriend Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon). Anu is being gossiped about at the hospital and Prabha is warned to keep an eye on her. Anu, though, is in love and headstrong. She wants everything in life, happiness and pleasure, sex and freedom, and she wants it all now. Anu ignores Prabha's disapproval, perhaps perceiving the envy behind it. Anu and Shiaz have chosen each other. Prabha did not know her husband before she married him. Prabha might never know that mutual thrill of discovery.
Prabha's widowed friend Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) works as a cook at the hospital and is being evicted from the shantytown apartment she has lived in for decades. Construction is everywhere, bulldozers pushing through the crowds, cranes dominating the skyline. Parvaty doesn't have papers proving proof of ownership, and Prabha helps the older woman find a lawyer. At one point, the two women engage in an act of rebellion, giggling as they throw rocks at a billboard announcing the building's development. The billboard declares: "Class Is a Privilege Reserved for the Privileged." Too on-the-nose? Have you looked around at the world lately?
The three narratives are interwoven but proceed on separate tracks, creating a mosaic of city life and relationships. Prabha has a gentle connection with Dr. Manoj (Azees Nedumangad): she encourages him to learn Hindi, he shares with her a poem he wrote for a competition. The situation is complicated. She's already "married", but, essentially, abandoned. Parvaty eventually decides to move back to her seaside village, prompting the final chapter of the film, a rich tapestry of magical realism and revelation. By this point, Prabha, Anu and Parvaty feel like old friends to us. We care about what happens to them. We care about the people they care about, Dr. Manoj, Shiaz.
Cinematographer Ranabir Das (who also shot "A Night of Knowing Nothing") shows great sensitivity to the texture of shadows, the blueness of night with blurred yellow lights in distant high-rise windows, punctuating the darkness instead of stars. In a scene where the nursing staff watch a training video, the light from the projector streams above their heads, but the screen's light is reflected on their faces, illuminating them but only partially. This is a good metaphor for the film itself, how it operates and how the characters are revealed.
Kapadia has an eye for the specific, important in such a sprawling story. There is a beautiful shot of the nursing staff racing out onto the roof to take in the billowing sheets as a storm approaches. Prabha sits in her apartment window, reading Dr. Manoj's poem with her phone flashlight, all as an elevated train rattles by far below, the night filled with city sounds, accentuating her feeling of solitude (and yet also intimacy: there is nothing more intimate than reading someone else's private writing). Rain lashes against the dark windows, the curtains and sheets flapping with the gusts, and Anu and Prabha lie in bed side by side, lost in their private thoughts. Anu and Shiaz are caught by cameras above the streets, lost in the throngs, giggling together and grasping hands (but only once they are out of sight of the hospital). It's a situation fraught with trouble. The pair keep their interfaith relationship a secret from their families. Anu's overbearing mother sends her pictures of men on dating sites, and they look through the profile pictures, mocking the men. The words from the film's opening haunt this burgeoning relationship: "Get used to impermanence."
Parvaty's seaside village is an oasis where the bustle of capitalism doesn't exist, where the air isn't filled with construction and trains but waves and wind. Anu and Prabha help Parvaty move. A nearly drowned man (Anand Sami) washes up on the beach, and Prabha saves his life with CPR. Then follows an extraordinary scene, best left to be discovered, where Prabha enters another realm on another plane. What she "imagines" might not be real, but it provides as much release as if it were.
Kapadia's love of cinema is apparent in every frame: Chantal Akerman's "News from Home" is a reference point, particularly Akerman's sense of dislocation and exile in New York City, but so is Apichatpong Weerasethakul, in whose films the boundaries of life and death dissolve, and night is a magical space where messages from other dimensions can get through. The darkness of "All We Imagine as Light" isn't darkness at all. The darkness is filled with light.
