Life disappoints and, reliably, so do the movies. But then one comes along with the boldness to suggest there’s a connection in simply feeling the ache and disappointments of life with others — somehow that’s enough. The characters will ask themselves: Why doesn’t my spouse want to be with me? Where can I go with my boyfriend without being judged? Can’t I just be left alone in my apartment? And by expressing that pain, a span of empathy is bridged.
Never explicitly, “All We Imagine as Light,” a miraculously subtle piece of work, poses all of the questions above, spreading a luxuriant, hypnotic ennui. Its writer and director, Payal Kapadia, was born in Mumbai and that’s where she sets her first drama — not the bustling battlefields of “Slumdog Millionaire” or “Monkey Man,” but a rainy city marked by the anonymity of crowds and small spaces.
There, a middle-aged nurse, Prabha (Kani Kusruti), makes her way to work at a hospital, where her slightly starchy manner finds a purpose among the aging and infirm. It’s good that she has a roommate, even one who’s late on the rent, like younger Anu (Divya Prabha), who brings home a pregnant cat, because the former’s husband is virtually a ghost. He went to Germany years ago for a job and is rarely in touch. Sometimes there’s tension between the two women, followed by a shy forgiveness. Anu has a Muslim lover, Shiaz (Hridu Haroon), and her happiness needs to be kept a secret from her traditional family and elsewhere.
Don’t mistake Kapadia’s tone for downbeat, though. There’s something sophisticated at work here, both pragmatic and playful. (She’s spoken of a love for the films of Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-wai and clearly knows them well, as does Ranabir Das, her cinematographer.) That seesawing piano riff on the soundtrack could be rain droplets or an improvisatory theme for a couple lolling around an open-air market trying on sunglasses. A mysterious box arrives from Germany containing a rice cooker but no note. What could it mean? A train cruises by their window at night like a caterpillar, the yellow windows of separate lives in other buildings illuminating its way. Meanwhile, Prabha’s widow friend Parvati (Chhaya Kadam), a cook at the hospital, faces eviction, but handles the news with remarkable pluck, flinging rocks at the property developer’s signage.
“All We Imagine as Light” is so confident in its poise, so expert in its exfoliation of a glittering, disconnected Mumbai and the delicate interiority of its trio of women, that it came as a disappointment to Oscar watchers that, in September, the movie was passed over by India’s selection committee to represent its home country at the Academy Awards. The snub is worth flagging here, not on grounds of taste — selection committees get it wrong all the time — but something more insidious. Said the president of India’s deciding body, “The jury said that they were watching a European film taking place in India, not an Indian film taking place in India.”
Is depicting the dissatisfaction of women not sufficiently Indian? (Don’t get cocky: Hollywood has this problem too.) The plight of Kapadia’s Oscar campaign ought to be a tiny note in the larger conversation around the movie, a prize winner at Cannes. In a perfect world, its success will be rejoinder enough.
But there is a political dimension to what Kapadia is doing here, one that crystallizes at roughly the halfway mark, when the film bursts out of its confines, as do the women. Displaced Parvati heads back to the palmy beach village of her youth, Prabha and Anu tagging along with her things. (After a beat, boyfriend Shiaz joins them too.) Their solidarity supercharges the movie, sending it into unlikely, near-fantastical realms. A romantic cave sequence splits the difference between mythic mystery and more immediate pleasures, a complex moment that the Roberto Rossellini of “Voyage to Italy” would have been proud to sign.
It would be a shame to rob a reader of the experience of watching Kapadia shed her film’s skin, reinventing in an entirely new register. It’s as if the director herself has run into an existential choice: to show women in the fullness of their complications, frustrated and abandoned? Or to give them an escape? Fittingly, for a filmmaker who already seems major, her answer is simple. We need both.