Light Work
By Saffron Maeve
New York Film Festival 2024:
All We Imagine as Light
Payal Kapadia, France/India/Netherlands/Luxembourg, Sideshow/Janus
In Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), a box of love letters and newspaper clippings found in a hostel inform an amorphous narrative of a student and her estranged lover set in the midst of protests against the Bharatiya Janata Party in India. The film blends stark and celestial imagery to create a dreamscape punctured by vérité footage of campus demonstrations at India’s foremost film institute, where Kapadia expresses solidarity at the level of “the student body, [...] the dancing body, the protesting body, the bodies that form our collective.”
Her debut feature, which served as a kind of cinétract, A Night of Knowing Nothing was an exercise in collective mythmaking, fashioning personal histories around India’s temperamental politics. Kapadia again expertly maneuvers themes of romance, ambition, and injustice in her second feature All We Imagine as Light, a languid, affectionate triptych of three working women in Mumbai coming to terms with their varying displacements: Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a pragmatic, aloof head nurse at a city hospital; Anu (Divya Prabha), a flighty new hire who has just moved in with Prabha; and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), the hospital cook and Prabha’s close friend who is being evicted from her home. Each of the women migrated to Mumbai—Prabha and Anu from Kerala and Parvaty from an unnamed coastal village.
Prabha’s husband from an arranged marriage left in a trice soon after they wed to work in Europe, a separationwhich has hardened her demeanor; a softhearted doctor (and aspiring poet) strives to crack through, but Prabha’s conjugal scruples keep their connection platonic. Anu, by contrast, is fresh-faced and plucky, unmoved by the circulating gossip of her clandestine relationship with a Muslim boy, Shiaz (Hridu Haroon). She is at times imprudent, disappearing into her cellphone on the job (Anu and Shiaz’s messages and voice memos appear as saffron-colored text on the screen), or failing to maintain basic household obligations, asking Prabha to cover her share of the rent. Prabha thus assumes a maternal posture in Anu’s life, cooking and cleaning for them both and occasionally casting judgment upon Anu’s interfaith affair. When Prabha receives a costly German rice cooker in the mail, presumably from her husband abroad, her state of abandonment grows more acute. The object represents both a haunting display of affection and a relegation to the domestic, where her relationships are filtered through acts and objects of labor.
In an analogous state of loss, Parvaty is widowed and without papers, which proves problematic when pitiless developers seize her home. Though she and Prabha attend Workers Unity meetings together and comb through her possessions for some sign of a house deed, their efforts are fruitless. The two find alternate catharsis in pelting rocks at the heinous development signage which reads, “Class is a privilege reserved for the privileged.” Like Kapadia’s earlier work, All We Imagine as Light suggests a twofold longing, for lapsed affection and stability in the face of precarity; these desires refract off of the metropolitan setting, which is defined by simultaneous excess and paucity.
Mumbai is painted as a consumerist playground in nocturnal sequences of garish storefronts and advertisements emitting a low glow on passersby, with fireworks ringing out in the overhead twilight. Characters allude to an unspoken code (“the spirit of Mumbai”), wherein even if one lives miserably in the gutters, they cannot feel or express anger, given the favorable condition of being in the city in lieu of their penurious hometowns. The film opens with voiceover of transplants describing living in Mumbai as an accomplishment in itself and a plunge into a bustling site of opportunity.
In a city inundated with signposts of capital, objects become the means by which characters relate to one another; they attempt to saturate their distances with saleable goods, but still cannot elude the loneliness. At one point, Anu peruses a shop in search of a burqa to discreetly visit Shiaz at his home, only to be devastated by a cancellation text post-transaction. A gutting, nighttime scene sees Prabha embracing the alien rice cooker on her kitchen floor, a proxy for the security and care of her absent spouse. In such moments of impossible solitude, there is little more to caress than fabric and plastic.
Prabha is sympathetic but not schmaltzy, rendering her the axis upon which the surrounding characters rotate. It’s a consequence of her profession, perhaps, that she should be so matronly, being a fixture of the hospital and keeping watch over nurses and patients. Kusruti wears a collision of sensations on her face throughout, flitting between enervation, care, strife, and yearning. Kadam’s comportment as Parvaty—who is perhaps dealt the worst hand of the three, aging, widowed, and at a lower station—is similarly complex, a lifetime of exhaustion reading as tranquility in the face of her eviction. Though comparisons to master Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray are frequently overworn, Kapadia excels at capturing bone-tired faces–eyes in particular, like rheumy orbs untrammeled by bodies—in a manner which evokes Ray’s mode of social realism.
Parvaty quits her hospital job and relocates to her childhood home, a regression that suits an ever-developing Mumbai. When Prabha and Anu accompany her for the move-in, the arrhythmic throb of the city falls away and the sense of possibility promised to them as transplants comes to fruition by the sea. The women, unbound by social mores and glutted sidewalks, are caught in a perpetual breeze and free to convene as they like—for Anu, this means sneaking off to see Shiaz, who has followed them and is amusingly camouflaged among shrubs. The women dine, quaff, and dance, a refreshed camaraderie unbound to their professional lives.
Their seaside excursions give rise to personal revelations. Prabha, who is slouching toward obsolescence in Mumbai, is urgently needed in the aftermath of an accident, which brings with it the requisite clarity to accept the fraught conditions of her marriage. Anu racks up the courage to pursue her relationship publicly, while Parvaty begins to acclimatize again to a home she once left. Kapadia grounds these psychic confessions in dusky images lit by strings of twinkling, varicolored LED lights, the kinds which line the streets of Mumbai, summoning pedestrians into congested bazaars. All We Imagine as Light is foremost a rich reconfiguration of the family unit, where three generations of laboring women manage, for a moment, to exist beyond the pressure cooker of urban living.