Few of the world’s great cities have appeared on film more often than has Mumbai. They named an entire cinema industry after the place. Yet those of us disgracefully uneducated in Bollywood catch glimpses on screen in only the odd art-house title. Payal Kapadia’s swooningly poetic second feature, a tale of three busy Hindu hospital employees, will thus feel to many like an education as well as a delectation.
There is something of The Waste Land in the opening chorus of disembodied voices. One is also reminded of Wings of Desire as, while the camera sweeps through packed trains, we hear whispered worries and murmured secrets. All We Imagine as Light is, like that Wim Wenders title, one of the great city films – drawing both joy and alienation from the unforgiving metropolis – but it gains a different flavour altogether as, in a lyrical close, it moves out towards the wider territories.
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Two of the three key characters, both nurses, live in a cramped apartment with an excellent pregnant cat. Prabha (Kani Kusruti), just about the protagonist, is facing up to the fact that her husband, working in Germany for some years, may not be returning home when he sends her, of all things, a posh rice cooker. The lack of a note looks to confirm the gift as a guilty brush-off. While she has been processing the absence, Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), a shy doctor, has been doing his miserable best to woo her. One night he passes her a poem he has been writing for a competition.
Anu (Divya Prabha), her flatmate, has been carrying on a secret affair with a Muslim man (Hridhu Haroon). She keeps this a secret from her conservative family and from the sometimes judgmental Prabha. There is a sense the latter has lived within herself so long that she has shut herself off to empathy. We detect a kinder person just itching to break out.
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As the film drifts about the humid bustle, the two find themselves allying with Parvati (Chhaya Kadam), widowed cook in the hospital, as she copes with news that developers want to seize her apartment for a flashy new project. (The story of one city is the familiar story of all cities.)
Each of the three leads is given the space to flesh out her character’s personality through subtle gesture and subtler omission. The gaps the women leave in conversations say as much as the spaces they fill. More than anything the film is about the necessity of allowing connection even when that can seem awkward or inconvenient. That journey is reflected mostly in the loosening of the muscles in Prabha’s sad face: a map of emotion.
The flatmates properly open up when they travel with Parvati, who has given up on the city, to the seaside village where she grew up. The change of location brings a concomitant alteration in tone and logic. A little magic realism creeps in as Prabha rescues a man from the sea and he appears – merely to her? – to transform into her missing husband. Freed from the manacles of urban tension, the women get an opportunity to explore the depths of their friendship.
Beautifully shot by Ranabir Das, a cinematographer who apparently revels in the variety of artificial light sources, those scenes welcome us into the last act with a warm, satisfying hug. It is, however, Kapadia’s generous polyphonic engagement with Mumbai that sits most memorably in the brain. That certainly did the business on this year’s Cannes jury. All We Imagine as Light, the first Indian film to play in the main competition for 30 years, won the Grand Prix, essentially the second prize, from Greta Gerwig’s jury last May. Kapadia has a voice for the future.
In cinemas from Friday, November 29th
