Year: 2024

Runtime: 115 minutes

Written and directed by: Payal Kapadia

Starring: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Hridhu Haroon, Chhaya Kadam

By Sarah Manvel

If you don’t watch Indian movies you have no idea what you’re missing. “All We Imagine as Light” is the first movie by an Indian director to compete at Cannes in 30 years, which is a very big deal. What’s even more delightful is it’s is a very good film, subtle and mysterious, which takes the concerns of its characters seriously while making it clear there are millions of other equally interesting stories currently happening in Mumbai. It has a sense of scope unusual in movies which focus on three people. The city is usually the backdrop to the characters but here the characters are a part of the city. Not projected above it, but of it. Not that the story is trapped in the city, either. At all times and in all places “All We Imagine as Light” is a remarkable story about self-determination, the difficulty of love, and the needs of the human body. It’s a quiet delight.

Prabha (a wonderful Kani Kusruti) is a liked and respected nurse at a small Mumbai teaching hospital, who wears a two-tone blue sari as her uniform. Her flatmate is Anu (Divya Prabha), a younger and seemingly more carefree nurse who is dating a Muslim man, Shaiz (Hridhu Haroon) in what they think is secrecy. A cook in the hospital kitchens, and an old friend of Prabha’s, is Parvati (Chhaya Kadam), whose apartment building is being demolished. Because Parvati has no paperwork to document her twenty years’ residency, she is not being rehoused, meaning that unless something drastic happens she’ll be out on the street. So Prabha must care for her patients, teach her students, be a friend to Anu, help Parvati attempt to save her living situation, and handle the attentions of a lonely doctor at the hospital, who isn’t from Mumbai and is struggling to adapt. Prabha likes the doctor too, exchanging thoughtful gifts and sad silences, but she is married. She barely met her husband before their wedding, and within the week he moved to Germany for work, but married she is. However it’s been over a year since he called, and Prabha can’t bring herself to initiate contact, even when Anu takes delivery of a red rice cooker with German writing on the labels. 

Hospital gossip has deemed Anu a slut for sneaking around with her (sweet, serious) boyfriend, which makes it no easier for Prabha to face the absence of her marriage and her husband. Parvati gives kind and caring advice, but she’s a widow with an adult son, both things it seems Prabha will never have the chance to be. If Anu’s family finds out she is dating without their permission or supervision, much less to someone from a different religion, things will end badly indeed. So everything is tense, and everything is difficult, but there are other faces to look at on the bus and a million other things happening around them. This choice by writer-director Payal Kapadia and cinematographer Ranabir Das – whose second unit clearly did plenty of sneak street shooting to provide such wonderful faces – manages to give this movie plenty of air in which to breathe. It somehow adds a sense of complicity, of privacy snuck inside of, as we watch Anu and Prabha make dinner and chat about their problems. Their cat is pregnant, and they even sneak her into the hospital for Prabha’s doctor to do an ultrasound, which he does despite being terrified of the cat. 

But eventually Parvati makes an unexpected decision which involves a journey to a seaside village next to a forest, and Prabha is surprised further when Anu decides to offer them her assistance. It’s soon clear Shaiz has followed separately so he and Anu can have some of the privacy denied them in the city, and together they make a discovery in the forest that’s the most incredibly and unexpectedly beautiful sequence of the film. Romantic, too. But then the movie tilts again, and something completely impossible happens to Prabha, something impossible and glorious that gives the movie its title. And at the end, as the three women and Shaiz sit in a beachfront café and adjust to their new circumstances, there’s a waiter who’s busily dancing to music on his headphones behind them, in a world completely separate to that of his customers. 

This sense of scope is very, very unusual and it’s worth emphasizing how it feels unusually like real life. We don’t often notice it because we are wrapped up in our own dramas, but the people sitting around us on the bus, or passing us on the street, are starring in a movie of their own. For a movie to capture that while simultaneously centering how three different women must make their own decisions about how to live their lives is a stunning double achievement. It’s wonderful the Cannes Film Festival has chosen this film which wholly deserves all the attention it will get as part of this competition. For all the dramas playing out at this festival, there are other, maybe even more interesting ones happening right now that we hadn’t previously noticed. And imagine what we could see if we were just paying a little bit more attention.