TIFF '24: "All We Imagine As Light" is one of the year's best films

by Cláudio Alves

France went with Emilia Pérez and Luxembourg chose not to submit a film at all. India was the last hope, but, as expected, went a different route, choosing a Hindi title, Laapataa Ladies, and ignoring the work of a director who's been outspoken against injustices in her country. Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light is officially out of the Best International Film Oscar race – a pity, for it's one of the year's best films, a miracle of grace that's as close to cinematic perfection as one can get. So much so that talk of awards feels improper, an anodyne aspiration in the face of what Kapadia unleashes on screen. Awards are too small to do this narrative feature debut justice. Even the Cannes Grand Prize feels insufficient, for All We Imagine As Light is one for the ages…

The dawn breaks and a city wakes, rising from its slumber for another day. Workers mingle in public transport while the lights of businesses all around blinker into colorful life, a cornucopia of activity everywhere you look. It's gradual as all awakenings are, starting with fluttering eyes and finishing with hurried gestures, the buzz of a metropolis in full throttle, electrified out of its dormancy and ready for the long day's journey into night. And then, it will all start again. Such are the cycles of city life and such is the reality Payal Kapadia captures in the opening of All We Imagine As Light, a bridge between the director's non-fiction past and a new narrative present. 

Watching this beauty, notions of documentary technique applied to fictional stories surge through the viewer's mind, but another cinematic heritage makes itself known. It's the tradition of the city symphony, born in silence when montage was the vanguard and Ruttmann sang the song of Berlin at 24 frames per second. In this and other passages, Kapadia widens her scope past the characters whose plight describes the story's shape, looking beyond, to the collectivity, the rhythms of a specific place, its colors, and innate music. Mumbai has seldom looked like this on film, simultaneously full of real-life detail, yet poetic in presentation.

To surrender to All We Imagine as Light is to immerse oneself in Kapadia's vision of Mumbai, plunging into the depths of unmediated lives while floating on a current of sheer poetry. There's lyricism here, and it pulls strongly away from the standard idioms of social realist cinema, toward a language more encompassing of marvel, open to the magic hiding in the mundane, the shimmering galaxies within every one of us. It's generous filmmaking, dipped in blue dye for an experience that glows sapphire-like, whether the light philtered through rainy skies or nurse uniforms filling the vision with gradations of azure.

Yes, All We Imagine As Light is a poem written in blue, paper shining with a glimmer of Klein's favorite shade and smelling of rain, perfumed with petrichor. It's also the tale of two working women in contemporary India, the older Prabha and the young irreverent Anu. They're nurses at the same Mumbai hospital and roommates, too, sharing their domesticity with the neighbor Parvati, a canteen worker, and a spirited feline that's as much a movie star as any of those Hollywood big names parading through the world's red carpets. Bound by an overarching sisterhood, the women live different stories under the same roof.

As played by Kani Kusruti, Prabha is a cautious person who lives in a marital limbo after her husband left for Germany many years ago. With no word from him, she might as well consider herself a widow, if not for the imperative of spousal duty that defines the woman's more conservative worldview. It's what's keeping her from chasing happiness elsewhere, with a kind doctor who awkwardly flirts with Prabha and tirelessly tries to forge a connection. Matters become more complicated when whatever inklings of hope for a new love wither on the vine as a package has arrived from Europe. It's a rice cooker, cherry red against the blues of Prabha's quotidian, ominous and irksome, sent with no note. It's merely a proof of life, if that.

Anu, portrayed by the personified sunshine of Divya Prabha, feels less repressed, even if her day-to-day is shaped by negotiations around that self-same repression. Her phone is always abuzz with messages from the parents back home, an endless cadre of potential suitors asking for photographic assessment at all hours of the day. Yet, she has found a match of her own, Shiaz, whose Muslim origins would keep him forever outside the marriage market for a Hindu young lady like Anu. Between societal pressures and the needs of one's heart, body and soul, the nurse finds herself the focus of rumors while spending much of her free time trying to come up with a place where she can be intimate with Shiaz – no easy task in a bustling city where private quarters are hard to come by.

In the end, Prabha's escape from the liminal space of spousal purgatory and Anu's romantic conundrums converge in a trip to the seaside, as Parvati has been evicted and is moving away from Mumbai. In dire straits, she needs all the help she can get. That's what passes for plot in a mostly plotless film, keen on swaying according to the amorphous rhythms of life. All We Imagine As Light may be a narrative debut but it shan't be shackled to the demands of traditional fiction, with Kapadia always privileging an observational register that promotes character study above forced drama of any kind. She's as gentle a writer as she is a director.

Indeed, the most significant movement within the film's story happens within, as Prabha's coastal misadventure awakens something that's been lying dormant inside her from time immemorial. The principle of care manifests in the aid of an ailing man and, in fractured communications across polyglot conversations, the nurse finds herself playing the part of a stranger's wife. What ensues is an impossible conversation suddenly made possible, a miracle like those only cinema can produce, through cutting and framing, the advent of performance, a palimpsest of opposite conversation and the painterly strokes of Ranabir Das' lapis lazuli cinematography.

Still skirting the temptation of forthright catharsis, Payal Kapadia offers her audience something better, an ellipsis into hope, brimming with kindness where one would expect judgment. She even adds a hint of humor. It's one of the most remarkable conclusions in recent narrative cinema, a manifest of grace that should inspire awe in all those blessed with the gift of All We Imagine As Light. That Kapadia can achieve all this while articulating a cogent critique of contemporary India, political and social observations burning red-hot within a dream of blue, is a testament to her talent and ability. If her short film and documentary work already heralded a new master of cinema, this latest endeavor all but confirms it.

All We Imagine As Light screened as a Special Presentation at TIFF. It will soon be part of the NYFF's sprawling offering of world cinema and will be distributed by Janus Films later this year.

Comments

[Juan Carlos Ojano]

This is one of my most anticipated films of the year, regardless of the Oscar race.

I really wish people would watch international films outside of the submissions. There's so much good stuff out there in the world just to limit one's options to the 80-90 films submitted (and let's be honest, only 10-20 of those are actually even widely available to be watched).