All We Imagine As Light review: The search for intimacy amidst a sea of turbulence

In this review, aryantalksfilm aka Aryan Vyas pens his deep, contemplative thoughts on the Cannes Grand Prix winner and MAMI opening film Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light!

In his book, "Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found", author Suketu Mehta visualizes Bombay from insiders and outsiders' views. A city that cherishes and crushes the hopes and aspirations of its inhabitants, Mehta describes Bombay as “just a way station, between paradise and hell." What makes it so dichotomous is not the constant flux of extremes it tends to be in, but the way in which it thrives for individualism enacted by western capitalist societies and the collectivism so in tune with the idea of India. One can be subsumed within the sea of crowd, reduce themselves to a cell of a larger being, or retain an almost obdurate sense of their own individuality. "This unending dichotomy of individualism and collectivism is the quintessential part of this metropolis”, he writes. For survival, then, commoners swing in between collectivism and individualism. However, the conclusive factor defining collectivism and individualism is power. The one who is in power asserts their ethnicity more efficiently. This then becomes a way to resist their collective identity. 

Power and identity, thus, have been the key points of conjunction in Payal Kapadia's filmography. They're a critical companion of history that asserts its intensity through the reverberating dichotomy of our chaotic cities. These metropolises, then, act as acclimation stations to the dreams and hopes for social and economic balance. Kapadia's approach positions cinema itself as an act of remembrance—imagining and reimagining languorous limbos of the subliminal that define these acclimation points. In one of the best documentaries in recent memory, A Night of Knowing Nothing, she drew upon asynchronous recitation to tell an urgent story as though it were a bad memory. The kind of remembrance where the past and future confront each other to transform the present as it unfolds. While it distilled the experience of being a youth in times of fascism, her new film, All We Imagine As Light, emulates the experience of being a woman - a lost soul - in the era of crony capitalism.

The same non-fiction flourish opens her latest, as we get a moment that features imbricating voices shot over a frenzied Mumbai nightlife. As we see the dazzling night markets amidst the cacophony, an unidentified voice speaks of the city's transient nature. The kind of spaces that take time away from you. It instantly registers the city as a space of contemplation, placing it in sharp contrast with what outsiders might think of it. There's an incomprehensible miracle of connections amongst the millions who inhabit the city and a sense of unspoken solitude.

That's when we met the three leads, all of whom work in a modern-day Mumbai hospital, Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), as nurses and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) as the helper cook. Apart from the connection of their shared working space, Parvaty is seen fighting a capitalistic builder against eviction as he wants to demolish her inherited chawl to build a towering high-rise while the newly moved-in and much flightier Anu asks the more sober and sensible Prabha to cover her share of the rent. Oblivious of the implications their relationship is bound to entail, Anu seeks solace after clinic hours with her Muslim boyfriend, Shiaz (Hridu Haroon).

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Behind the semblance of perseverance and professionalism, it's the alienation and the quiet indifference of the oddities of Mumbai that the three share in common. The feeling of Mumbai has often been emulated on screen since millennia, to the extent that it's become a subgenre of its own. And yet, the world Kapadia depicts feels tangible in a manner that doesn’t have a celluloid reference thus far! There's no hard focus on the romanticism associated with the eclectic cosmopolitan feel of the place, nor is there any attempt to examine its rotting underbelly. Shot by cinematographer Ranabir Das (who has worked extensively with Kapadia previously), this film lets you soak in the subjective blues of the corners where millions of immigrants find themselves lost. The discordant and minimal use of jazzy motifs (from composer Topshe) gives dexterity to the emotional flux stemming from the broader sociopolitical underpinnings.

While Parvaty's parallel subplot underscores the contemplation required on issues of encroachment further reexamining the status quo of the acclimation station, Prabha and Anu's complex dynamic constantly leaves an unrealized mood of emotional insecurity looming that clings over these women’s lives. It only makes sense how soon their journeys coalesce, bringing the three to a destination that not only allows the restricted spaces to breathe but their inner consciousness too. It's here, in the heart-achingly mesmerizing denouement of All We Imagine As Light, that the clashing discomfort of the inner and the outer worlds comes crashing in. The melancholia sustained through the city that never sleeps finally begins to show echoes of breeding collectivism; the fact that it comes secondary to our characters' collective struggles and ultimate reckoning only makes it more cathartic.

Because, much like Kapadia's bricolage filmmaking, we too are a function of more than what we inhabit. The separated lovers in Prabha and her unseen husband form the film's inciting incident and its emotive push, while Anu's nascent rebellion out of her desires connotes pain born out of potential erotic separation. Their existential condition takes on an aesthetic mood, which cues the film to enter its allegorical aesthetic space. For one, the wounds of love and betrayal are felt as a sundering of the self, while for someone like Parvaty, the separation from that which was once hers and that she rightfully deserves seems to be dwindling out of reach. But everyone seeks to fix the only thing plausible by the end: saving the beloved - self - before it turns against itself. Before the alienation becomes internalized.

Through her palimpsestic sonic narrative of drawing cultural memory along with its conspicuous multilingualism, Kapadia’s artistic commitment to cinema’s power to dream and to bring along cathartic reconciliation comes full force with this Cannes Grand Prix winner. Through the turbulence of characters, her film intricately frames the search for intimacy for women as an act of dissent in contemporary India. This particularly takes on a different meaning with the social protests India has observed in the past months for countless structural subjugations of women (and not just female doctors). 

Through this faith and the film’s critical ethics, All We Imagine As Light exemplifies its aesthetic strategy to create a surreal mood by juxtaposing individual eros with a collective tragedy to prove its point. In order to galvanize popular imagination, images might feel ephemeral, but they can also linger, haunting with obstinate returns and forcing viewers to think and, perchance, to act.

All We Imagine As Light had its Indian premiere at MAMI Mumbai Film Festival this year. 

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