‘All We Imagine as Light’ REVIEW: Different Kinds of Love in Vivid Display
‘All We Imagine as Light’ REVIEW: Different Kinds of Love in Vivid Display
Still taken from the British Film Institute
We watch movies to understand the world around us better. We watch them to escape, for the time it allows us, into different lives that inspire us to believe in the possibility of molding a better world. All We Imagine as Light recalibrates the latter notion to invite us to find beauty and connection in the everyday without changing a single thing about its inconveniences. Payal Kapadia crafts the film as an act of love, showing the ways Mumbai’s bustle has barely given time for its less privileged protagonists to feel and to live, while painting a full tapestry of their emotional spectrum.
Its opening minutes offer a candid introduction to Mumbai through various residents’ voices — resigned to a life of fewer privileges, yet hopeful for the little good that might still be worth reaching for. Placed alongside images of people getting ready too early just to make barely survivable wages, its specificity resonated with me, echoing the early morning preparations of various stalls and carts being set up before sunrise, and the image of long lines of people waiting to get into sardine-packed trains and buses.
The film introduces us to Prabha, Parvaty, and Anu, three nurses who’ve spent a lengthy period in Mumbai with little time to enjoy life beyond work. Prabha seems to have her responsibilities together, where even her loneliness needs to be compartmentalized because there’s no time or communal structure to process feelings. One of her friends, the older Parvaty, is widowed and facing the possibility of losing her residence when her building is bought by a developer. Anu, the youngest among them and Prabha’s roommate, is like many young people — having just enough to enjoy a youth that’s put into involuntary societal scrutiny, where she has to hide a budding relationship with Shiaz, a Muslim man.
These three stories are all about romance at different stages. Anu wants to fall deeper in love regardless of what everyone else thinks. Parvaty’s husband passed without leaving her the necessary paperwork to prove her decades-long residence in her building. Based on her conversations with Prabha, there don’t seem to be plenty of lovely memories that Parvaty was left to cherish in their relationship. Prabha accepts her fate, acknowledging her marriage to a man who’s never spoken to her since he migrated to Germany for work after their wedding. It’s when an air fryer makes its way to her, one made in Germany without his name on it, that her feelings gradually come forward. She even tries suppressing romantic sparks between her and a doctor who doesn’t mind that she’s married, to keep up appearances for a husband who may as well not exist.
There is tenderness in the way the film captures how disappointing love can be without ever nudging toward the melodramatic. One potentially frisky afternoon with Shiaz is canceled, and seeing Anu standing by the train platform as his messages of cancellation pour down along with the rain carries more heartbreak than shed tears could express. I’ll always come back to this one scene of Prabha’s contemplative face staring into space in her small room, in the dark of the night. Uncertain about the package she’s received, she heads to the kitchen and reopens the box on the floor to hug the object threading them together — an air fryer. She yearns to be loved back as the lights of Mumbai’s skyscrapers reach far and dimly into her much humbler abode. It’s a scene mired in darkness, but once its intent lands on you, you’ll grow to appreciate DOP Ranabir Das’ work.
The film also offers sharp observations on generational friendships. There’s one dinner that Parvaty and Prabha share where one of them says they’ve wanted to try the place out for a while. It’s a splurge for them, but nothing more than a restaurant for those with plenty of money to spend. It’s these moments that gently reassert the place of third-world romances on the big screen. Another shot I come back to is when Prabha finally takes up her workmates on an offer to watch a film with them. It’s only one shot that pushes in on her as she takes in the movie she’s seeing. It was one of many moments in the film that finds beauty in everyday life.
Its third act takes its characters to a beachside town, where the trio of nurses gets a moment to dance their feelings out before going into their own necessary individual journeys. But even in this time of rest, they aren’t really on a vacation because they’re there to help a friend with moving back. These moments are tinged with the urgency that they will go back to their ordinary city lives at the end of the weekend — and after the film’s story ends.
When you’re a third-world cinephile who has to walk out of the theater back into a callously inconvenient city life, it’s the worst feeling. But once the film is done taking its trio’s different emotional stages into their necessary destinations, I am stirred with hope that an unromantic life like mine can still be worth finding the beauty in. At a time when ticket prices seem to fight to keep more people out of the theater, it’s films like All We Imagine as Light that make me wish storytellers like Kapadia can continue bringing third-world stories to the stage of world cinema.
