Lovely sophomore feature of Indian director Payal Kapadia shines in the Cannes competition due to its lambent depiction of two Mumbai nurses forming a connection with one another within a city of 20 million people.
This movie, although gently coruscating, has shown its unique beauty through an instance from early on in it. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) a hardworking nurse with tired eyes rides the commuter train home at the end of another long day, gazing out at the glimmering blur of the city. Her life is anything but a fairground and yet, clinging to a pole to steady herself with the rushing night air stirring her hair, she could almost be riding a carousel. Just two features into her young career, Kapadia has established her rare talent for finding passages of exquisite poetry within the banal blank verse of everyday Indian life.
In this somewhat worn-out local hospital where Prabha works, even though she seems incapable and lackadaisical when it comes to personal issues, she can be very warm-hearted regarding others while trying to solve their problems like old women suffering hallucinations about ex husbands or Parvati (Chhaya Kadam), Prabha’s best friend is being forced out by heartless property managers after losing her husband. Mostly dead or away here are husbands who left home, In fact, Prabha had recently married as he went overseas job hunting and swearing that he would call for her when possible. She hears from him less and less.
Prabha comes back each evening after tending for patients all day to their shared apartment where Anu stays another nurse who appears young and beautiful but leads secret affair with Muslim boy Shiaz (Hridu Haroon). Initially Anu perceives Prabha as part of stuffy older generation that snucks in late lies about were she goes but mainly younger girls do. Similarly Alanna Bennet finds that at first Prabha also thinks in the same line, condemning Anu when a workmate warns her that her not-so-secret flings with Shiaz are becoming notorious.
Like Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility”, Anu is all dreams and rebellion and amorous aspiration, Prabha all practical capability. When he imagines his kisses in the raindrops falling on his skin & Prabha is busy to save drying hospital linens from being soaked by this shower. But neither knows that their professional lives have an element of altruism. Anu gives one to a disturbed girl who already has three children at age 24 upon discovering she cannot afford expensive contraceptive choices for herself.
Then two odd though less than miraculous things happen that draw them nearer to each other in some undefinable way. The first is when Anu brings home a pregnant cat, which they then start taking care of as their common pet. The second one is a package from her husband far away that carries the shiny expensive-looking rice cooker for the kitchen that makes it as strange as the monolith from “2001.” Prabha hides it below their sink without explanation, disturbed by the appliance and what it represents about her marriage’s limbo.
At work, meanwhile, Prabha finally agrees to let Doctor Manoj (Azeez Nedumangad), who is struggling with learning Mumbai’s language due to being an outsider in town, take her out for an evening walk. This only results in small intimacies shared between two of them. DP Ranabir Das’ shots of this scene are shot through dappled lights ranging from cell phone screens shining bright to fairy lights or simulating fireworks bursting above Mumbai skyline resulting in informally sumptuous images. A few movies have ever done such a perfect job reflecting loveless romance of Mumbai at night.
It is so deeply lived-in and beautifully rendered view of the city that leaving it behind almost hurts when Prabha and Anu travel to the seaside village where Parvati has ultimately given up on the incessant harassment by Mumbai developers and returned to her old family house. Yet, just after changing locations we see how displacement serves as a broader theme of this film. Both Anu and Prabha are originally from Kerala, hence this short respite from gigantic Mumbai allows us to focus more narrowly on the ties formed between female characters as they support each other emotionally. We also find out that despite looking fragile their connection has surprising strength.
Anu & Shiaz’s affair comes out into open here where there is no noise around nor there are any judgements for the city. The young man has followed his teenage boyfriend to this place and Prabha discovers it at that moment. It is also here, however, that Prabha, who risks losing herself altogether in Mumbai’s invisibility cloak of respectability and encroaching middle age, gets a chance to realize that maybe in Anu, Parvati, and Shiaz especially she has found her own little tribe so there is no need to wait for the return of the husband.
The film’s title is only ever obliquely explained by a story someone tells of a factory worker so exploited by his workplace’s gruelingly long shifts that at times he could barely remember what the daylight looked like. But in the gentle resolution of “All We Imagine as Light” which is not as strained as it may sound while we hear the twinkling piano theme one final time alongside strings of LEDs blinking, we can hope these women will not suffer the same fate. They are surrounded by lightness and perhaps they only have to imagine its existence because it starts within them.
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