‘All We Imagine as Light’ Is the Quiet, Surprise Masterpiece of the Year

“The city takes time away from you,” an unseen voice says, near the beginning of Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. “You’d better get used to impermanence.” The city in question is Mumbai, which an opening montage presents as a monsoon-season metropolis filled with clashing dialects, crushes of crowds and a tropical level of heat. The writer-director started her career as a documentarian, and while it’s a cliché to call a location a character in a movie, there’s the sense that she’s introducing both an antagonist and a patron saint in this quick vérité sketch.

It’s a portrait of a destination for so many people looking for work, steady wages and a bigger world outside of India’s small towns and villages, yet what you’re seeing is not claustrophobic or cacophonous — no modern-day Babel designed to crush citizens underfoot. It’s simply a place teeming with life that people either temporarily or permanently call home, where the only constant is change. There are a million stories in the naked city, and Kapadia is about to show you three of them in the most delicate, moving way possible. She’s also about to mount a quiet, sneak attack on your soul.

The gentle way Kapadia frames these early scenes of everyday people moving to and fro, complete with voiceovers of typical non-native residents, the Mumbai-after-dark cinematography of Ranabir Das and a gorgeous snatch of gossamer piano jazz from the Ethopian musician/nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, is so beguiling that it lulls you into a bit of trance. So you might not clock right away that a woman the camera seems to be lingering on, the one leaning on a train pole for support, is the first of the holy trinity set to guide us. She is Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a nurse in her late thirties that works at a local hospital. Her good looks attract the attention of kindly doctor new to city, yet she radiates a bone-deep loneliness. Her seniority means that she’s responsible for training many of the younger staff, including Anu (Divya Prabha). This twentysomething is sympathetic — she gifts birth control to a wife inquiring about rewards for spousal vasectomies — and is the subject of snippy gossip among her peers because she’s seeing a Muslim man, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), on the sly.

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Anu, we soon find out, happens to be Prabha’s roommate as well. It’s a necessary arrangement, given that both women are struggling to make ends meet. The older woman is actually married, though her husband went to Germany to work in a factory soon after their nuptials and hasn’t come back. One day, a package arrives: a rice cooker sent from overseas by her M.I.A. other half. It’s the sort of MacGuffin that you could see other filmmakers turning into a needlessly heavy symbolic anchor; for Kapadia, it’s simply the wistful embodiment of an arranged union that never had time to get beyond the transactional. In the wee small hours, after Anu has snuck out to see her beau, Prabha takes the cookwear out and gently embraces it while sitting on their apartment floor. It’s the first time in All We Imagine as Light that you feel your heart ever-so-slightly break, while feeling like a voyeur for bearing witnessing to such an intimate moment. There will be others.

The third member of her party is Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), the eldest of the three and the one arguably the most at risk in terms of stability. A widow who works with both Prabha and Anu, and who’s lived in the big city for ages, she’s currently battling developers who want to demolish her apartment and put up high rises. Prabha is determined to help her fight these corporate vultures sending thugs to her friend’s door, and reaches out to a lawyer she knows who specializes in forced relocations. Parvaty has no case, however — her husband never told her about the paperwork she’d need to prove she lives there, and because he’s dead, she’s at the mercy of a system designed to favor the male of the species. The best she can do is attend workers-of-the-world activist meetings and throw stones at the signs of these future condos, which promise “better living” for whomever can afford such luxuries.

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All the while, All We Imagine as Light is weaving these three stories in and out of each other, playing some aspects of them as social commentary, some as affectionately breezy farce and others as muted, lives-of-quiet-desperation tragedy. We’re conditioned as moviegoers to expect plot turns and possible twists, to anticipate which way a narrative or two might lean or suddenly pivot. The relationship between Prabha and Anu falls somewhere between sisterly and a mother-daughter dynamic, with the former empathetic but reserved and the latter impulsive enough to risk ruining her reputation and standing by dating someone outside her faith. You wonder if a stand-off between the two over this clandestine love affair is inevitable, and will lead to a larger betrayal. Or if this couple who can’t seem to find a private place to be intimate — the fact that they can only furtively make out in parking garages and on park benches during rainstorms becomes something like a running joke — is destined to become martyrs due to bigotry. Or if the middle-aged woman fighting for her apartment and her agency will be reduced to another victim of class warfare, where the rich get richer and the poor get the picture.

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Kapadia, as masterful a filmmaker as they come, is happy to let viewers wonder where these stories will intersect, and how they’ll collide into or off of each other. Then she decides to pull a fast one. Pravaty decides she’ll return to her coastal village in Western India. Prabha and Anu decide to help her move. The film shifts into a slightly different register as the settings become more nature-friendly. Different, though not superior — the movie isn’t trying to suggest that the city is an evil place that must be escaped, or that the rural region is some sort of lost paradise. It’s simply a new setting that makes a new mindset possible. The three women might now have a chance to get something near to what they want. For Pravaty, it’s home. For Anu, it’s possibility of finally consummating her relationship. (The sex scene here is presented tenderly and tastefully, yet is still explicit enough to make you wonder how or if this will play in certain areas.) For Prabha, it’s closure.

And then, in one fell swoop, All We Imagine as Light drops a sideways bit of magical realism into the mix that’s as lyrical and evocative as the movie’s title, and in something like a neon-spiced coda (let us take one more moment to shout out cinematographer Ranabir Das’s lyrical use of color splashes and dusk-to-dawn darkness), Kapadia’s gracefully work reveals what it truly is: an ode to the power of intergenerational sisterhood. It ends not with a bang but the softest of contented sighs — both the characters’ and your own. It’s possible to contrast those captured cityscape moments that opened the film and feel like destination you have arrived at by the time the credits play over some local youngster dancing in the distance is a world away. But the journey to that sensation, courtesy of Kapadia’s heavenly work, is far, far richer than you could have possibly imagined.