All We Imagine As Light: Beauty in the Ordinary

by Rohan Connolly

All We Imagine As Light deserves your full attention. 

Captured among the vast cityscapes of Mumbai and cushioned by a beautifully atmospheric score, you journey alongside two nurses, Anu (Divya Prabha) and Prabha (Kani Kusruti), as they navigate the turning points they have reached in their lives. Anu is still in her youth and hopeful for the future, her priorities lie in pursuing a relationship with a Muslim boy against her family’s wishes. Her roommate, Prabha, is approaching her middle age, has a husband she rarely hears from ever since he moved abroad for work and lives her life much more pragmatically, choosing to focus on her work and her close friends. 

Director Payal Kapadia is not afraid to take things slowly. Each scene is punctuated with silence and stillness, brief moments where the audience and the characters are allowed to breathe and sit with each other. The camera lingers a couple extra seconds as Anu and her boyfriend share a private kiss and stare into each other’s eyes after getting caught in the rain, it lingers on the looks that the women share with each other in their apartment and it lingers on the city of Mumbai. 

Almost exclusively portrayed during the night, the city of Mumbai is a beautiful, bustling environment. It lights up our characters' faces as they look out their windows. It puts smiles on their faces as they wander around a night market, it provides them shadows when they need to hide from someone chasing them after causing trouble and it allows them anonymity when they need it most. Not only does the city feel alive, but even the nameless pedestrians come alive on screen. 

Opening the film is a sequence of the people who live and work in Mumbai that is so honest in its portrayal of life in a big city that I thought I had accidentally walked into a documentary—Kapadia’s previous experience with documentary work makes itself known here. Anonymous voiceovers of people explaining that they moved to the city for work, leaving their family behind in the village they’re from, going over their daily life in the city, are layered over scenes of women on the train, some of them sleeping, some looking out the window, and some having electric conversations. 

As much as the camera loves to linger, time passes quickly in the city. The days go by so fast, we nearly always catch our characters leaving their jobs and venturing out for the evening and never in the morning. The hustle of the city contrasts with the slow pace of the second half of the film which takes place in the coastal village of Pradha’s friend Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) which she returns to after being evicted from her home in Mumbai. The film spends as much time on a single day in the village as it spends on several days in the city, it lingers at the restaurant the characters visit and on the beach. The sun lights up not only our characters the way the city did but everything around it. It shines down on their faces leaving nothing for them to hide in the shadows of the moonlight we so often saw them in, exposing all of them though they remain protected by the beautiful foliage that surrounds their every step.

Kapadia demands your attention with the slow pace of the film and rewards those who give it. It is a deeply honest representation of what it feels like to live and to learn from the people you don’t realize you can learn from. It asks you to open up your heart to these characters and shows that there is so much to celebrate in the ordinary.