All We Imagine As Light movie review: Payal Kapadia’s lyrical ode to working-class Mumbai and female friendship

Kapadia uses her deceptively gentle observational style punctuated by sharply delivered location truths, which she utilized to specified bully effect successful ‘A Night Of Knowing Nothing’, to archer her story, astir 2 Malayali nurses, Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), and their Maharashtrian co-worker Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), the trio forming the benignant of friends-like-family bonds which often consciousness stronger than humor ties, particularly erstwhile we unrecorded distant from location and kin.

A infirmary tin go a tract wherever intimacy builds with bewildering speed, arsenic covers are withdrawn, leaving humans bare some physically and figuratively. There’s an unmasked prime to the conversations betwixt the older Prabha, having experienced the metropolis successful ways that the younger Anu hasn’t. But Prabha, struggling with the loneliness resulting from a matrimony with an absentee hubby distant successful Germany, feels overmuch much inexperienced successful the matters of the bosom compared to the open-to-the-moment, flirtatious Anu, whose narration with the Muslim Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon) makes her the butt of gossip amongst the different nurses. Parvaty’s imminent eviction from the gathering she has lived successful for implicit 20 years becomes a turning constituent successful the lives of these women, arsenic does the accomplishment of a mysterious atom cooker which comes bearing overseas stamps and smells.

Kapadia’s movie is intensely personal. A country successful which Prabha comes upon the cooker, stashed nether a cupboard, and clasps it wrong her knees, is shockingly, unexpectedly sensual: aboriginal successful the film, which moves to the Ratnagiri coast, with its beauteous azure coastline sparkling successful the cleanable water air, truthful antithetic from the distinctive tarpaulin-blue of the Mumbai skyline, the characters shed their calcified metropolis skin, and observe the mislaid parts of themselves.

EYE | Payal Kapadia: Cannes triumph helped with the organisation of All We Imagine As Light successful India

It is besides intensely political. If you don’t person papers (‘kaagaz’ successful India present comes with loaded connotations), you cannot beryllium that you are a bonafide nonmigratory of a metropolis you person helped build. Parvaty’s hubby was a mill-worker, a abstraction which has been gobbled up by rapacious builders: volition she ever beryllium capable to spell backmost to that place, due to the fact that the colony is lovely, but if determination had been livelihood choices there, would anyone privation to determination away? Anu and Shiaz’s narration coming successful for censure from the former’s closest compatriots speaks to today’s polarised India: volition it ever spell backmost to the older, little oppressive ways?

I did consciousness a definite flattening successful immoderate parts wherever the poetic becomes suppressed by the quotidian, but those are acold and fewer successful between. Beautifully changeable by Kapadia’s changeless cinematographer Ranabir Das, the movie is suffused with light, lambent successful immoderate places, shard-like successful others. And a quality that’s 1 of the astir affecting I person encountered successful the movies: the fantastic Kani Kusruti turns yearning into a full-time job, and conscionable for her, this movie (released contiguous successful India) is worthy each infinitesimal of your time, imagined oregon otherwise.

All We Imagine As Light movie cast: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon, Azees Nedumangad
All We Imagine As Light movie review: Payal Kapadia
All We Imagine As Light movie review: 3.5 stars