“All We Imagine as Light” is a quiet drama about fragility, beauty and kinship, and what it takes to keep going in ordinary, difficult times. Set in contemporary Mumbai, it centers on three Hindu women, their everyday lives and the bonds that they share with one another as well as with the larger world. It’s the kind of modestly scaled and lightly plotted international movie — with characters who look and sound like real people, and whose waking hours are set to the pulse of life — that can get lost amid the year-end glut of Oscar-grubbing titles. So, it’s worth mentioning upfront that it is also flat-out wonderful, one of finest of the year.
The women work together at a busy city hospital, where two are nurses and the third is a cook. The nurses, Prabha (Kani Kusruti), who looks to be in her late 30s, and the much younger Anu (Divya Prabha), are roommates and living with a runaway cat in a small, cluttered apartment. Both nurses have complicated personal lives. Prabha’s husband left her behind to work in Germany and has drifted away from her, leaving her achingly alone. Anu has a secret lover, a young, earnest Muslim man she’s trying to keep hidden from everyone, including her family and Prabha, a reserved woman of decorous sensitivity.
The story develops organically to incorporate the cook, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a headstrong, middle-age widow. She’s struggling to stay in the apartment that she had shared with her husband, which developers now plan to raze. They’ve threatened her, if she doesn’t leave on their timeline (they’ve sent goons to her door), but Parvaty talks tough and conveys a resiliency bordering on obstinacy. When Prabha finds a lawyer to support her through her legal troubles, Parvaty flatly rejects the offer. “I don’t need any help,” she says with her back turned to Prabha. Like the two nurses, Parvaty seems determined to go it alone.
In time, all three the women grow closer, and their lives become more intertwined, a shift that the writer-director Payal Kapadia develops with unforced naturalness and a remarkable lightness of touch. Kapadia has a background in documentary — this is the first feature-length fiction film she’s directed — and she integrates brief streets scenes of a thrumming Mumbai throughout “All We Imagine as Light.” Crucially, she opens the movie with a series of nighttime images of unidentified men and women working and wandering about the city, milling through busy streets, riding on crowded trains, visuals that she overlays with voices speaking different languages. “I was pregnant,” says one woman, “but I didn’t tell anyone.”
This opening — with its seductive blur of anonymous voices and moving, always moving bodies — efficiently sets the scene and tone. As important, it also introduces a characteristic modernist concern with the attractions and the drawbacks of cities, with their frenetic swarms and cacophonous din, their liberating and soul-crushing anonymity. The city gives and it takes in equal measure, though not always fairly. It’s where Anu and her lover, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), can escape and melt into the crowd to hold hands, yet the city imperils Parvaty and may leave her stranded amid the clutter of fast-rising luxury towers. “Class is a privilege,” a billboard for one such tower blares. “Reserved for the privileged.”
Though all the women receive their due, Prabha is the most central and vividly drawn. Physically reserved, with deep-set eyes that shuttle between searching openness and downcast reserve, she is revealed gradually and often through her interactions with others. She’s unassuming, polite to the point of deference and seemingly unaware of her striking looks. When a doctor, Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), approaches her one night, asking if she’s been working late, she apologizes without apparent reason. “Sorry doctor,” she says, seemingly oblivious of his interest in her, “I lost track of time.” When they go their separate ways, he gives her a poem that he wrote for a competition, though also perhaps for her.
The doctor’s interest, or maybe the word “time,” seems to awaken something in Prabha, and Kapadia’s realism becomes more lyrical. That evening, Prabha returns home to find that her husband has sent her a new rice cooker but no note. Later, she slips out of the room she shares with Anu and sits before an open window to read the doctor’s poem. “My dreams are made of everyday things, small and scattered, that I’ve left behind,” you hear a man in voice-over, his words rising above the urban hum. On another evening, Prabha sits on the floor of her kitchen and folds her body around the rice cooker, an image so suffused in longing — for the absent husband, a family home or maybe just a caress — that it pierces the heart.
Midway through “All We Imagine as Light,” after the doctor has made some sweets for Prabha and after Anu has tried out a disguise to slip into her lover’s neighborhood, Parvaty arrives at a crossroads and the story takes a turn, too. The three women leave the city for a coastal village and the movie slips into a more peaceful, contemplative register, as if it were taking a great big breath of fresh air along with the characters. The tempo eases a bit, though it never approaches the glacial pace that has become a stultifying tic in certain art movies. One of the pleasures of Kapadia’s filmmaking is that she’s inviting you to discover her characters on their terms, which means embracing the inner and outer rhythms of their lives.
It’s at this beachside idyll that the story’s fragments; its swirling themes and the women’s desires — including the need to be held in another’s embrace, whether of one person or of a community — converge. It’s shockingly beautiful. “All We Imagine as Light” is a drama about life’s fragility, but it’s also about nurturance. That may sound as precious as a homily straight out of Sundance, but it’s just the reverse. Kapadia’s three women have troubles, but she isn’t asking for your pity, and she doesn’t sweeten their difficulties to make them more palatable for your sensitivities. Instead, she is offering you the gift of three lives that may seem altogether different from your own but are also and, finally, transcendently familiar.
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