After a shaky start, competition at the 77th Cannes Film Festival has picked up considerable heat in the last few days. Another late-fest hit joined the party today courtesy of Indian writer-director Payal Kapadia, whose sophomore feature All We Imagine as Light dazzles with its lyrical, quietly moving dissection of womanhood and the immigrant experience in Mumbai today.
The film revolves around two women working as nurses at a hospital in the Indian metropolis. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is the more uptight, traditional of the two. She leads her life according to the conventions of society, married someone arranged by her parents who’s subsequently gone to Germany for work. Contact with the husband she hardly knows has dwindled to non-existent. Does that give her permission to accept actual companionship, for example from the nice doctor who writes her poems and bakes her cookies? Her roommate, the younger and free-spirited Anu (Divya Prabha), refuses to be married off and is secretly seeing a Muslim boy despite social taboos. When one of their colleagues is forced to move back to her home village, the two women offer to help and spend a day in the countryside where each would realize something new about themselves.
Kapadia’s screenplay is quite a thing of beauty. The two main characters are constructed with much care and emotional detail. In the case of Prabha, you have someone from a generation that didn’t have a choice but to accept the female fate unconditionally. The chronic loneliness from being a good Indian woman, however, is starting to give her doubt. Anu, on the other hand, belongs to a generation of women who want to take charge of their bodies and make their own rules. But is she ready to face the pressure of rejection, exclusion, leaving behind a life she’s built for herself in the city?
On the strength of these two vividly drawn characters, the story unfolds organically and culminates in a magical third act that impresses with its deep humanity. A scene between Prabha and someone she saves at the beach, in particular, adds a touch of surrealism while allowing the characters to have a conversation they never had. It feels intimate, insightful and above all, very kind. The reference to the inability of people trapped in darkness to imagine light gives the film’s striking title an added poignancy. It also makes you reconsider the plight of its protagonists and their attempts to escape.
Mumbai is very much a character itself. In the film’s brief opening sequence, we see shots of the city’s impossibly crowded streets while people who have moved there in search of a better life share their thoughts off camera. Throughout the rest of the film, there are similar interludes where observations about living in Mumbai are shared on top of snapshots of the vibrant cityscape. These sequences not only inject a strong sense of place to the story, they provide further context to the state of mind of the characters, all of whom are immigrants from the countryside and must constantly contend with the prospect of moving back home. As someone noted, “Instead of the city of dreams, Mumbai is more like the city of illusions”.
These breaks from the main narrative betray Kapadia’s background in documentary filmmaking, which is also obvious from her visual language. Her camera captures locations that feel real and expressions that feel unguarded, nothing looks overtly polished or staged. This truthfulness transports you to a far corner of the world and conveys the vulnerability of the characters eloquently. Kapadia also knows how to compose a memorable shot. There are many scenes in the film that stay with you for their sheer visual impact. The final shot, for example, is simple in construction but absolutely gorgeous. It also evokes a feeling of serenity that seems to assure you everything is going to be alright.
Kusruti and Prabha are both great and complement each other wonderfully. The former shines in scenes where the monotony of her life is disrupted – by an unnamed parcel, unexpected gifts from a suiter or the accidental discovery of her roommate’s secret. The latter embodies a free spirit trapped by conventions with effortless persuasion.
Empathetic, soulful, unwaveringly generous, All We Imagine as Light is another film that in my mind would be a fabulous Palme d’Or winner. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. After the final two competition films are screened tomorrow, we shall get to the business of picking favorites and predicting winners.
