All We Imagine as Light

 Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light is a deceptively simple film, an example of poetic realism, examining the lives of three women who work at a hospital in Mumbai.  The film has rough edges and, for 2/3rds of its 115 minute length, approximates a documentary --there are many hand-held shots, tracking scenes shot from subway cars, and images of monsoon storms in which the sky turns to a blue flood over the forest of high-rises.  Mumbai is shown in images that emphasize its claustrophobic aspects -- the tiny apartments and crush of people on the streets.  Lovers petting in a park appear against a backdrop of boys playing soccer just beyond a tattered veil of trees.  The subways are crowded to the point of appearing suffocating.  On the soundtrack, voices describe Mumbai as chaotic and lonely, a sort of funnel into which all the villages of south India have poured their people to make this thronging ferment -- everyone in the movie is a stranger and they are homesick for the impoverished rural places from which they have come.  But the last third of the movie, filmed along the Kerala coast, is bucolic and takes a strange turn into something like magical realism.  This part of the movie is integral to its meanings and, although describing the plot twist near the end is a spoiler, I don't know any other way of doing justice to this unique and wonderful film.  So, readers, beware...

Prabha is an efficient, experienced nurse at a teaching hospital in Mumbai.  Her husband, whom she barely knew (it was an arranged marriage) has emigrated to Germany where he works in a factory.  For a time, he called her and sent money home, but, now, has gone silent.  When Prabha calls him in Germany, she gets a woman's voice on the answering machine.  Prabha is isolated, like most of her associates, a refugee from a small, poverty-stricken Malayalam-speaking village somewhere a half day's train ride from the big city.  She repels invitations to go to the movies with her colleagues and rebuffs men who tentatively attempt to encourage her interest in them.  She seems sad and remote.  One day a rice-cooker arrives in the mail, a product of Germany -- during the monsoon, with sheets of water falling outside the window (and through as well since the shutters have blown open) she squats on the floor to embrace the fire-truck red cooker; it's all she has of her husband.  Prabha's roommate is Anu, an attractive nurse probably about fifteen years younger.  Anu is carrying on a forbidden affair with a Muslim boy, Shiaz.  All the other nurses know about this liaison, except perhaps, Prabha, who has turned a blind eye to the matter.  Prabha is trying to help Parvaty, a matronly lady also from the Malalayalam-speaking hinterlands.  Parvaty has lived for 22 years in what is called a chawl -- that is, a one-room apartment with an open balcony in a tenement building.  Mumbai is under construction and huge high-rises are being built everywhere, including on the tract of land where Parvaty's chawl is located.  The landlord intends to evict her without compensation since her papers are not in order and she can't even prove that she exists -- the lease was in the name of here deceased husband.  Prabha finds a lawyer to represent Parvaty in the landlord-tenant dispute but the attorney can't do anything to help her -- she's officially a non-person.  The first two-thirds of the movie documents these women's daily lives -- we see them on the subway, the lovers wandering in a night market or embracing by a soccer field, Prabha training young nurses who turn up their noses at a placenta that the women are studying in class.  The doctor whom Prabha serves tries to flirt with her very, very tentatively -- Prabha is teaching him the local lingua franca, that is, Hindi.  When Prabha discovers that Anu is involved with Shiaz, she insults her as a "slut", but, later, apologizes and makes Anu's favorite dish, fish curry -- Anu is also from a Malayalam village near the coast.  A cat is about to give birth.  The monsoon rains drench the city.  When it is apparent that the lawyer can't help Parvaty, Prabha and the older woman go out and throw stones at a billboard advertising the soon-to-be-built high rise resulting in the destruction of her chawl.  Anu is invited to visit Shiaz's home with his parents in a Muslim neighborhood.  Shiaz' parents are about to leave town for a wedding and the lovers will have the house to themselves.  Meanwhile Anu's mother keeps sending her pictures of possible fiancees.  Anu buys a burqa so she visit Shiaz' Muslim neighborhood.  But, then, he calls to tell  her that the subways are all flooded and that the wedding has been canceled as well.  A religious festival is underway -- earthmovers and tractors tow towering religious floats through the streets and there are fireworks.  This sequence, involving the appearance of something like the gods, marks the transition to the last third of the film that takes place far from the big city along the coastline with its rocks, coastal mountains, and beaches.  Parvaty, who is a cook at the hospital, has found a job cooking at a beach-front hostel in the village where she still has a house.  With Anu, Parvaty and Prabha go to the coast where they take rooms at a resort on a beach. Shiaz has come also and is hiding out somewhere in the environs.  He takes Anu to a sea-cave filled with ancient, eroded carvings of gods and goddesses -- Anu says that the voluptuous goddesses look like Anu.  We see a sheet or blanket spread out in the cave, apparently where Shiaz hopes to have sex with Anu.  In fact, they do have sex but the film is conspicuously vague about the location -- their mostly naked bodies are bathed in light; it is as if they are making love in a great torrent of bright light.  Prabha who has gone off into the brush to relieve herself, sees Shiaz and knows that Anu's lover has also come to the seaside resort.  A man has drowned in the sea.  Prabha runs out onto the beach where she applies CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the man who slowly revives.  There is no hospital anywhere nearby and so the man is taken to a hut where a wizened, tiny old lady lives.  The little old lady thinks that Prabha is the man's wife and she asks her to stay by his bedside as he revives.  The man wakes up but has no recollection of where he is, or how he came to be in the sea.  Prabha feeds him and washes a large wound on his side and, then, recognizes that the man is her husband, somehow, returned from Germany.  (This is the remarkable event that animates the last part of the film.)  She caresses the confused and injured man and, then, in an eerie voice-over accompanied by shots of twilight blue hills fading into mist says that she never wants to see him again.  Parvaty and Anu are sitting on the beach.  Prabha joins them and tells Anu to bring Shiaz to their beach shack.  In a long shot, under a sky resplendent with stars, we see the beach shack lit up, with music, and people dancing.  

The last part of the film is very delicately handled.  The transition from realism to dream-like fantasy is gradual.  At first, there is no electricity in the shack, but, then, miraculously there is power.  The lovers in the cave seem to be making love on the beach in bright daylight.  The strange, eroded gods watch over the young lovers.  The half-drowned man is confused about his identity and we have no way of knowing whether, in fact, he is somehow Prabha's husband who has abandoned her.  (This part of the movie reminds me of Lijo Jose Pellisery's Nanpakal Nerathu Majakkam, a film in which religious pilgrims find themselves stranded in a tiny village when their bus breaks down -- gradually, the pilgrims become disoriented and experience memories of their reincarnations; the little town is almost completely devoid of men who have all gone to Europe or Dubai for work.)  We have seen that Prabha is a kind of ghost herself, estranged from others due to her marriage to a man who has abandoned her.  Her profession is that of a rescuer and, when the nurse resuscitates the man on the beach, she perceives him as her lost husband -- she has rescued him and so, now, can escape from his baleful influence...at least, this is my interpretation of the film's ending.  The drowned man says:  "It will be different this time," but Prabha rejects him -- is this a sign of her growth?  Or just more evidence of her isolation? The pace of growth in Mumbai is irresistible; the city is being transformed into something not recognizable by its generations of immigrants from the poor villages in the area.  Parvaty says "the future is here but I'm not prepared for it."  She remarks that  she feels "scared"; Shiaz is scared by his love for the rather frivolous Anu.  An inhabitant in Mumbai says in Marathi:  This is a city of illusions.  Another woman says in Bengali:  "Even if you live in the gutter, you must not be angry.  This is the spirit of Mumbai."

The film resembles Jean Renoir.  It is very tenderly made and inexplicably moving.  In Malayalam, Shiaz writes on the wall of the cave, among other grafitti:  "Our love is like the endless sea."  And, it is from this endless sea of love, that the drowned man is pulled from the waters.  All We Imagine As Light was awarded the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024.