Review: All We Imagine As Light

Director:  Payal Kapadia

Stars:  Divya Prabha, Kani Kusruti, Chhaya Kadam

Darling of the year’s festival circuit, topper of the Sight & Sound end-of-year list of the Best Films of 2024 and controversially frozen out of Oscar contention by the Indian selection committee, Payal Kapadia’s narrative feature debut All We Imagine As Light is slowly trickling its way down the tributaries of British distribution. As the chains (including Picturehouse) gorge themselves solely on the season’s tentpole releases and festive favourites, its up to the independents and art centres to allow Kapadia her glimmer of light.

In early voiceover – documentary snippets set to rough, handheld morsels of the buzzing city – Mumbai residents tell of their relation to the city and one muses that they would never return to the rural provinces having felt the energy of the capital. Kapadia presents the metropolis during a rainy season. Glistening, shimmering with neon, buffeted and flooding. Her images are redolent of Wong Kar Wai capturing Hong Kong, or Tsai Ming-liang framing Taipei. But All We Imagine Is Light is hyper-specific to its locale, as we will see.

The film concerns co-habiting nurses Anu (Divya Prabha) and Prabha (Kani Kusruti), bunking together in a cramped flat, who have adopted a quasi-mother/daughter relationship. Anu, the younger, in her early twenties, is evading marital overtures from her own parents and seeing a Muslim boy, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), on the sly. His religion defines their romance as incompatible in the eyes of their families, which perhaps makes the allure all the more vivid. Middle-aged Prabha is married to an absent man living abroad in Germany whom she hasn’t spoken to in over a year. And while one of the doctors at the hospital, Dr Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), is clearly making overtures of his own, propriety keeps Prabha from turning it into a serious connection.

As Anu weighs up the worth of continuing to date Shiaz, Prabha comes to seem like the personification of her potential future if she resigns herself to tradition. Prabha seems caught in the jaws of societal expectation. A bird caged. She is a manifest warning to Anu of what is perhaps lost if she concedes to the pressures surrounding her.

The first 80 minutes of the film take place in the urgent claustrophobia of Mumbai, rendered with an earnest sense of realism. Kapadia defers to the restraint of classical world cinema masters, couching delicate and touching scenes in the judiciously plaintive music of her accompanist Dhritiman Das (aka Topshe). All We Imagine boasts one of the finest scores of the year, ranging from plaintive piano suites to washes of cyberpunk synths that can’t help but associate present-day Mumbi with the imagined dystopic horizons of Los Angeles in the Blade Runner films.

Then, in direct contrast to those opening remarks, the film absconds to the countryside, replacing the throng of car engines and street merchants with the perennial hush of the sea. New opportunities for connection and sensuality present themselves to Anu and Prabha when they help an older colleague, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), retire to the village of her home. In these late passages Kapadia does a handsome job of echoing the quiet reverence of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (and an intimate rendezvous with Shiaz even plays like a direct echo of Blissfully Yours). Prabha has the most stirring happenstance encounter. One that has the potential to change her entire outlook, presented with a newfound coyness from Kapadia. Enveloped in a slowly accumulating blanket of field recordings, she builds her piece to an intoxicating crescendo.

I’d argue that the final scene of the film, lining the characters up on the beach as if for a curtain call, isn’t needed at all and, if anything, trips Kapadia up. She’s already found her astonishing high and the perfunctory epilogue isn’t necessary. I had a strange time with All You Imagine As Light overall. While impressively mounted, handsome and affecting, I bumped into an undercurrent that’s tough to pinpoint, but which has the same feeling one encounters in certain western prestige pictures. It all just feels a little bit calculated. As if designed, intently, to woo jury panels and arthouse crowds with a palatable but ultimately unchallenging facsimile of bolder work. An exceptional imitation as opposed to a thrilling voice in its own right.

It’s not that Kapadia has nothing to say (her reflections of intolerance between Hindi and Muslim communities couldn’t be more timely, her commentary of overdevelopment and gentrification couldn’t be more blunt) but in spite of great performances and handsome cinematography helmed by Ranabir Das, All We Imagine As Light can’t quite escape its own lofty intentions. It’s slightly locked into patterning itself after the rarefied highs of others, and struggles for its own personality. Cold and (appropriately?) dull at first, warming in the main, but the aftermath left me questioning, wanting… It feels, dare I say, bourgeoisie?

A perfect facsimile of a beloved arthouse darling, it’s not for the lack of trying that All We Imagine As Light left me a little distanced, it was the vague sense that it was trying very hard to get me. And the tension in that underlying exchange means that it’s one I can readily like… but not entirely love. Perhaps I’m looking too hard, or judging too harshly. Perhaps the head has won out over the heart. I really was impressed, but the way one might be impressed by a master forgery.

Kapadia has all the tools required – that’s evident – and perhaps just needs to be a little less self-conscious and judicious and take a lesson from her characters and lose herself in the moments. She’s almost there.

Almost. But not quite.