‘All We Imagine As Light’ Review: Payal Kapadia’s Sublime Love-Hate Letter To Mumbai

Director: Payal Kapadia
Writer: Payal Kapadia
Cast: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon
Language: Malayalam, Hindi

All We Imagine As Light opens like a non-fiction film about a city of grand fictions. We see a dark Mumbai — the factory of dreams — in which its survivors and victims imagine light. Invisible migrant voices play over a montage of traffic, streets, beaches, stations and hope. A pregnant housemaid jokes about being fed well by her employer. A veteran from Gujarat refuses to call it home because he’s afraid he might have to leave any moment. A dockyard worker recalls the fishy smells from his first night; he speaks like the stink has gone, but it’s his nose that adapted. A woman credits the place for making her forget a breakup. They all sound like stories from the “Spirit of Mumbai” handbook — it’s hard to tell their fate from their faith. The film seamlessly transitions from the generic to the specific by the end of this montage. The camera settles on one such story in motion: two Malayali nurses on the train back to their tiny apartment.

Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is a human portrait of longing. You can tell that Mumbai is both her refuge and reckoning. She’s married, but only just. Her husband migrated to Germany years back — for the same reason so many migrate to Mumbai — and now he’s a lingering memory. A soft-spoken doctor from the hospital she works at fancies her, but she’s unable to be single enough for him. She is yet to be exorcised of the past. In contrast, Anu (Divya Prabha) is young and lively. She’s in a secret relationship with a Muslim boy, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), whom she spends her evenings with (and salary on).

A still from 'All We Imagine As Light'.

The bond between the two women contains multitudes. There is no single label. Prabha is maternal with Anu; she often covers her rent, cooks for her, feels protective, and even snaps at her for being a subject of gossip among other nurses. At times, they look more like separate stages of the same person. The older lady is envious of how carefree the younger one is. She sees a kindred spirit of sorts, but it’s a spirit that’s on the brink of being commodified by the mythology of the city. They are strivers, yet they aren’t sure what they’re striving against. When the affable hospital cook, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), decides to move back to her village after being bullied by a builder, Prabha and Anu help her relocate. Distance, soon, makes the hearts grow yonder.

The first hour of All We Imagine As Light unfolds as a tender interrogation of the idea of Mumbai. It pits the reality of people against the place they’ve fought to become stories in. Unlike the voices in the beginning, Prabha and Anu aren’t faceless, but the film uses stylistic choices to suggest that the city is always threatening to erase them. For example, the texts and conversations between Anu and her boyfriend often start over echoey images before the actual shot of them appears; you can sense the characters struggling to stay visible, pushing against the instincts of the metropolis. When Prabha talks about her marriage one night, the camera floats out of their window towards a few highrises, again reducing the women to a vignette in an ongoing montage. Consequently, every time they’re on screen, it feels like a minor triumph of identity.

This tussle between imagery and soundscape is a recurring theme. The title of the film appears over the reflection of a half-built skyscraper on a hospital window. The cacophony of drilling and capitalism taunts the fragility of those on the other side of the glass. The film is sprinkled with little details like these. The opening shot of streets whizzing by feels like it’s from the perspective of an ambulance. When monsoon hits, the nurses scramble to the terrace to unclip their fluttering uniforms — which look not only like clothes without bodies, but also identities without names. There are constant allusions to the migrants’ relationship with time. One of the first voices ponders about the transience of time in Mumbai. Anu is first seen at the reception, bored and whiling away the minutes during a mundane shift. When Prabha and her fellow Malayali doctor discuss his struggle with the Hindi language, he wonders how “kal” can denote both tomorrow and yesterday. It’s as if the city is so short of space and time that even different meanings are forced to share the same word. By extension, Prabha is the tomorrow and Anu is the yesterday of the same life: the opening shot of them features Prabha standing by the train door and Anu resting in a fetal position.

The cast melts into the crests and troughs of the environment. Kani Kusruti’s eyes alone hint at all the flashbacks, the context, the accumulated ache and the loneliness of Nurse Prabha. The way she looks at a movie on the big screen is not too different from how she watches the world around her. It’s like she is clutching onto the last embers of desire before the cynicism of middle age engulfs her — and for this, she relies on her bond with the girl she’s sheltering. Divya Prabha’s Anu is attached to her like a Hirokazu Koreeda character, composing a makeshift family in an improvised city to soften their circumstances. Watching the two of them across the film is like observing a face until it loses all familiarity. The women we see at the beginning of the film look everything and nothing like the ones at the end — a mirage that stems from the physical subjectivity of the viewer rather than any changes in appearance.

The actors convey the melancholy of adjusting — of making do — within the narrative framework of Mumbai. The carrot on the stick is rotting; its people are stuck in a cultural quicksand, sinking into the twin fictions of ambition and opportunity. Prabha is independent in theory, but continues to depend on the silhouette of a husband; the city deepens her limbo of being nowhere under the guise of going somewhere. Anu is in love, but the sheer volume of society around them turns it into a clandestine arrangement. Their intimacy is Mumbai-coded: she sends kisses to him through the clouds so that the rain can touch his lips. When they do lock lips, it’s in the shadows, behind football fields and in basement parking lots; their fingers surreptitiously meet at a traffic signal. She even buys a burqa to sneak into his house, but the plan fails — a reality check for a couple forced to pass off social invisibilisation as personal anonymity. It’s like they’ve hit a glass ceiling and can’t move beyond. They want more, but the very place that united them also thwarts their attempts to enter a future. When the faceless voices return halfway into the film, they sound tired. The thrill is gone, all that’s left is grief for the footnotes they are resigned to become.

The second hour of the film unfolds in a coastal village. It feels like a brief period of respite for the women. At first glance, this ‘retreat’ is tinged with hope. Their incomplete desires slowly find fruition here. Parvaty reclaims that elusive stamp of belonging: she owns a house, frolics in the sea, bargains at the fish market, and drinks at noon without a care in the world. Anu’s love story breaks free under the unobtrusive sky, between rustling trees and abandoned caves. A scribble of ‘Azaadi’ (freedom) on the cave wall prompts Anu and Shiaz to remember that theirs is an interfaith relationship; she finds the stillness to confront their uncertain future. Even Prabha escapes her emotional prison in a beautifully-staged sequence that merges fantasy with fidelity. Their liberation is best epitomized by the shot of a tipsy Anu and Parvaty dancing to an old Bollywood number, while Prabha watches on with a mix of curiosity and wonder. Most of it suggests that they’re no longer stalled by the empty contradictions of the big city.

But there’s also something bittersweet about this part. A bit of magic realism bleeds into Prabha and Anu’s experiences. It’s as if none of this is actually happening. It feels too good to be true, like a utopian afterlife of sorts. It’s designed to make us wonder if these three women have had to migrate from life itself in order to escape the city. If you look closer, however, the characters are very much alive — only haunted. Most scenes in the village are influenced by the oddities of urban living. The visual grammar of Prabha’s closure — which also explains the symbolism of the title — stems from a poem that the doctor once wrote for her. When Prabha nurses a mysterious stranger, it looks like a manifestation of a sponge-bath anecdote that Anu had narrated on a BEST bus. It also stems from an early scene, where Prabha’s old patient recalls a hallucinatory dream about her late husband. The film’s climax under the starry night sky seems to originate from the virtual skylights that helped patients sleep in the hospital ward while Prabha and her interns made their rounds.

These moments unfurl like souvenirs. They ‘adapt’ the realism of Mumbai, infusing subconscious impressions of the city into the characters’ self-styled resolutions. The Spirit of Mumbai is, in fact, a ghost that looms over their trip. It shapes everything they do. Their small joys are infected with the permanence of survival. It’s to the film’s credit that we process their escapism in isolation from the stories they tell themselves. If anything, it feels like the village is offering them hope and healing in the only language they understand. The result is a literary experience where people are read instead of books; where words and worlds jump out of the pages; where overexposed memories jostle with faded photographs; and where the prologue of leaving masquerades as an epilogue of returning. Payal Kapadia’s intuitive gaze does what Indian films are not conditioned to do — it humanizes a concrete jungle’s ambient relationship with humanity. It lets the eyes adapt to the imagined light as well as the lightness of being. After all, Mumbai is the city that never sleeps because, if it does, its dreams might be exposed as delusions.