The Gorgeous Mumbai Rhapsody of “All We Imagine as Light”

It’s tedious to talk about the weather, but “All We Imagine as Light” compels me to at least attempt an exception. From the moment the movie begins, on a warm night during monsoon season in Mumbai, the writer and director, Payal Kapadia, evokes heat and moisture with extraordinary sensual power, and in a cascade of richly atmospheric details: a man’s sweat-stained shirt; outdoor fans whirring above a slow-moving throng; a welcome breeze pouring in through the windows of a rattling commuter train. Later, the rains will come: when Anu (Divya Prabha), a young hospital nurse, sits on a bench with her boyfriend, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), a sudden downpour drives them away—the latest indignity for two young city dwellers who haven’t had much luck finding privacy.

Anu shares an apartment with Prabha (Kani Kusruti, an actor of piercing presence), who works as a head nurse at the same hospital. Kapadia introduces them separately, not as friends or roommates; by the time we finally see them in cramped quarters, we already sense that they lead determinedly individual lives. Anu is sweet, open, and gregarious, as unembarrassed to flirt with a colleague as she is to coo fondly over her pet cat. Prabha is older and sterner, and she surveys Anu’s flights of irresponsibility with both exasperation and affection. On paper, the two women might sound like too obvious a study in sisterly contrasts, but the actresses’ beautifully matched performances sidestep such schematics. In the film’s most revelatory moments, Prabha’s sad-eyed wisdom and Anu’s unconstrained joy don’t clash; they harmonize.

Both women moved to Mumbai from the southern state of Kerala, and, even from afar, they remain beholden to their families’ rigidly traditional expectations of womanhood. Shiaz is Muslim, and so Anu, who’s Hindu, must keep their relationship a secret from her offscreen parents, and also from his family: in one funny, sad, and politically pointed sequence, Anu dons a burqa en route to a booty call, in order to pass through his neighborhood unsuspected. Prabha has her own painful, if less stigmatized, longings, which Kapadia unlocks by way of a special delivery—a shiny rice cooker—that arrives at the door one evening. It’s a gift from Prabha’s long-absent husband, whom she knew only briefly before their arranged marriage, and who has since moved to Germany for work, with no indication of when he might return.

As kitchen appliances go, the rice cooker has a peculiarly poignant cinematic lineage. Its finest onscreen hours include Claire Denis’s “35 Shots of Rum” (2008), in which two rice cookers mark the evolution of a father and daughter’s relationship, and Wong Kar Wai’s “In the Mood for Love” (2000), an immortal saga of romantic longing that is set in motion, in part, by the purchase of a rice cooker abroad. In these films, as in “All We Imagine as Light,” the rice cooker is not just a cosmopolitan status symbol (“It’s so international!” Anu marvels) or an instrument of domestic liberation; it’s a harbinger of looming separation and loss. No wonder Prabha sinks to the floor of her kitchen one rainy night and folds her husband’s gift in a silent, wrenching embrace, as if it contains her every last grain of hope.

Roughly the first half of “All We Imagine as Light” is a city symphony—a melancholy Mumbai valentine. Kapadia sends her characters into town on rhapsodic gusts of soft jazz (composed by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou), and, early on, she sets the scene with unidentified voices, some of them belonging to real-life Mumbai locals, describing, in a profusion of languages—including Bengali, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Malayalam, and Marathi—their love-hate relationship with the city. “I’ve lived here maybe twenty-three years, but I feel afraid to call it home,” one murmurs. Another says, “The city takes time away from you. That’s life. You better get used to impermanence.”

In a sense, Kapadia’s method of infusing realist fiction with nonfiction touches is an inversion of the approach she took with her first feature, “A Night of Knowing Nothing” (2021), a formally unorthodox documentary about the film-school uprisings that erupted in 2015, in response to Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist regime. The film’s harrowing protest footage was held together by a delicate strand of fiction, involving an intercaste relationship. In “All We Imagine as Light,” Kapadia puts another socially forbidden romance front and center, and although no one here throws a Molotov cocktail, ripples of rebellion nonetheless trouble the movie’s placid surface. In one scene, another hospital worker, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a widow who’s being forced out of her apartment by rapacious developers, hurls a rock at a billboard advertising the new complex. It’s a satisfying act of sabotage—even the typically well-behaved Prabha joins in the fun—but it hardly dispels the deeper injustice here. The villain isn’t just corporate greed; it’s a world in which a woman’s rights effectively die with her husband.

With no other options, Parvaty decides, after decades in Mumbai, to return to her birth village, in the coastal district of Ratnagiri; Prabha and Anu come along to help with the move, and the film follows suit. The shift is breathtaking: the sun chases away the rain, and the roar of the sea overpowers the chatter of crowds. At last, Anu and Shiaz (who sneaks down for a spell) find the privacy they seek, though even here their lovemaking—in a sequence of hushed, rapturous surrender—cannot escape the sensitive probe of Kapadia’s camera. (For much of the scene, it’s worth noting, the camera pointedly adopts Anu’s perspective.) Prabha, for her part, cannot escape the grief that has haunted her all along, and which finally yields here, through a chain of events both harrowing and dreamlike, to the consolations of community and solidarity. Friendship, we’re reminded, can be a profound act of resistance.

“All We Imagine as Light” made headlines earlier this year, when it became the first Indian movie in three decades to play in the Cannes Film Festival’s main competition. (It ended up winning the Grand Prix, or second place.) That the world’s most prestigious film festival has been so historically unreceptive to Indian cinema naturally raised questions about this rare exception; in the months since, Kapadia’s film has been slighted by some observers as, essentially, a European art-house film in Indian drag—a perception that was inevitably compounded by recent news that it had not been selected to represent India in the Oscar race for Best International Feature. (The movie, a France-India-Netherlands-Luxembourg co-production, could theoretically have been submitted by any of those four countries.)

The business of awards is incidental, if not irrelevant, to the beauties of art. But it’s both fitting and revealing that “All We Imagine as Light”—one of the year’s great movies, in any form, style, or language—should slip through the cracks and frustrate the rules of a long-broken system. There’s a sad irony in the fact that a drama so attuned to feelings of drift, and yet so deeply rooted in a sense of place, should be, in this instance, a film without a country. ♦