Hal Kitchen
It is the duty of much of art to balance the political and the personal concerns of the piece. We often think of films in terms of the message and the story, as if they are distinct, but it’s important to understand that the overall sentiment and substance of any work of art is integral to the feeling it leaves the viewer with and vice versa. A film that attempts to impart a message of fairness and compassion should embody that message in its story. Similarly, the personal journey of its characters should reflect the wider themes it is addressing. This year’s Cannes Grand Prix winner All We Imagine as Light introduces the audience to characters dealing with wide reaching social problems, and then dives into their personal responses to them. On one level it is about the concerns and pressures weighing on the women of modern Mumbai, and another micro level it is a very personal story about the lives of two of these women and the particular set of emotions they are each wrestling with.
Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is a nurse living and working in central Mumbai. She is married but has not seen, or even spoken to, her husband in many years, since he left to find factory work in Germany. Emotionally and socially bound to a man who is perpetually absent from her life, she is very lonely and closed off, but she is faced with the possibility of romance in the form of a charming new doctor (Azees Nedumangad) whom she’s been showing around. Also faced with a difficult choice is her younger roommate and colleague Anu (Divya Prabha), who is under pressure to marry from her Hindu parents but has been secretly seeing a sweet Muslim guy (Hrindu Haroon). Anu is a polar opposite to Prabha, impulsive and naive where Prabha is thoughtful and reserved, lovestuck and giddy where Prabha is weary and cold. Both love men they cannot currently be with, and it would take an act of great recklessness to change that. As such, they are stuck in a kind of stasis, both constrained by social mores and unable to claim the happiness laid out before them.
Though she does not quite comprise a third point in a trio, as she is not the subject of as much narrative focus, though she does in fact impact the plot greatly, there is also Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), another colleague whose own situation is much more dire as her claim on her home of 20 years is now being contested by a construction company wishing to put up a tower block on its site. In a scenario that echoes the subject of recent Hong Kong drama All Shall Be Well, the property was in her late husband’s name and as a widow, she has no legal right to stay and is being forced out. Much of All We Imagine as Light is focused on the roles women play in Indian society but it is through the defiant Parvaty that we get most of the specifics. Despite the differences between each of these three women, they form between them a kind of holistic portrait, finding in each of them a past and future self of the same person: from Anu, the bubbly youth with her heart on her sleeve, to the weary and forlorn Prabha, to the wizened and stubborn Parvaty.
Not very much actually happens in All We Imagine as Light. There are no big confrontations or explosions of catharsis. The climax of either woman’s story is a long awaited sex scene and a conversation that takes place almost entirely in Prabha’s own head. Though each one functions perfectly as a satisfactory resolution to either character’s story, providing closure on their respective relationship troubles. The film is divided into slightly uneven halves with the first hour or so spend in Mumbai and the second half in the fishing village where Parvaty was born. All three women were born in such villages before they came to Mumbai for work and this second half relocation provides an opportunity for introspection for both Anu and Prabha. Each of these halves is begun with a kind of chorus of different women speaking in voiceover about their relationship to the city where they live and the illusory beacon of hope it represents, one of the strongest themes in the film is the illusive nature of city life, so its therefore highly significant that it is only once the characters retreat to the country that they are able to parse out and confront their feelings effectively.
Though realistic, there’s a poetic nature to the approach director Payal Kapadia takes to her film, and it does ultimately present the viewer with a moment of true magic realism at the end. This is a bold and risky tactic, sometimes a touch of surrealism can be the perfect way to articulate the film’s thesis without getting too didactic, or to explode the conflicts in a provocative way. All We Imagine as Light’s ending is one of the subtler examples you’ll find though, and doesn’t feel like too much of a break from the lightly romantic and often humorous nature of the overall piece. The reflective tone throughout has a consistent sense of emotional care and curiosity, maintained by the frequent piano-led music and the cinematography of Ranabir Das which matches the naturalistic fly on the wall tempo while still creating some beautiful, painterly compositions.
All We Imagine as Light offers a balanced and thoughtful window onto the lives of its characters, gently exploring the ways they are each struggling to free themselves from the lives they’ve fallen into and to find love and serenity in a hectic schedule that makes little room for such things. It could’ve probed harder into some of these issues, or into its individual characters, but the performances are so strong that very little is required for us to untangle the mystery of their feelings. Kani Kusruti in particular is profoundly engaging as Prabha, and Divya Prabha manages the difficult task of investing a character defined by her youthful romantic spirit with considerable intelligence and sensitivity. The handful of scenes they have together project an unaffected familiarity and compassion, even in the absence of mutual understanding, which is the skeleton key to their liberation and to the success of the film’s marriage of the political to the personal.
