Review: 'All We Imagine as Light' is a poetic and profound cinematic spellbinder
Now more readily available in theaters as the award races heat up, "All We Imagine as Light" is a poetic and profound cinematic spellbinder that you don't want to miss. Alternately tough and tender, it's a tale of female sisterhood in a big city full of societal, economic and political pressures that can force out intimacy and kill the yearning to hold onto a dream.
Of course, this can happen in any modern metropolis. But the setting here is Mumbai, one of India's most populous cities (more than 20 million people). The director is Mumbai-born Payal Kapadia, 39, a true film artist who just won the directing prize from the famously hard-to-please National Society of Film Critics. Expect more honors to come.
Kapadia, a documentarian doing her first feature-length fiction feature, is eager to show how humor, romance and nurturing light can bubble up even in this class-divided city of contradictions and missed connections.
The stunner of an opening shows the people of Mumbai, many transplants, bustling to work, their thoughts expressed in voiceovers that show their determination and the staggering loneliness that comes with dislocation. What they dream or imagine offers a rare solace.
The focus is on three Hindu women in various stages of crisis. Each works in a large city hospital, two as nurses and the other as a chef.
The sublime Kani Kusruti plays head nurse Prabha. She lives in a tight squeeze of an apartment with a stray cat and a much younger nurse, Anu (a fun, feisty Divya Prabha), a dynamic contrast to Prabha's reserve. Both have guy problems with an Indian twist.
Anu defies rules against interfaith relationships by secretly carrying on with the Muslim Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon). And Prabha hasn't heard from her husband since their arranged marriage a year ago, though she did receive a rice cooker from Germany, where he lives, without a note of explanation. The way Prabha nuzzles the machine suggests she still has feelings, which interfere with the come-ons from flirty doctor Manoj (Azees Nedumangad).
Complicated? Heck, yeah. It's Prabha and Anu's widow friend, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), the middle-aged hospital cook, who sparks the plot when she is evicted from her shantytown, where Parvaty and Prdbhha throw rocks at a billboard that bluntly states, "Class Is a Privilege Reserved for the Privileged."
That's when Parvaty asks her two friends to help her move back to her home village by the sea. The move is also a chance for Kapadia and her creative team (cheers to cinematographer Ranabir Das for the textured blend of light and shadow) to let in the sights and sounds of nature, unencumbered by the buildings and noise that cut off freedom and feeling.
It's the film's last third (no spoilers) that allows the three women to reconcile their differences and build a stirring sense of community and a kind of peace.
Delicate business is being transacted here and Kapadia arranges each part of the mosaic with a transfixing power that sneaks up and floors you. Barriers of language, culture and politics vanish in the light of our common humanity. Just sit back and behold. "All We Imagine as Light" is filmmaking at its finest.
