There’s a short scene in “All We Imagine as Light” in which a lonely woman cradles a rice cooker, and everything that has come before in this transcendent movie suddenly shifts, your perceptions included. In this one crystallizing moment, the woman’s yearning, desire that has been discreetly waiting in the background, rushes into view. In fewer than two minutes, she transforms from a character whom you have just begun to know into one who — by virtue of her longing and aching vulnerability — has immediately taken up residence in your heart.
The woman, Prabha (Kani Kusruti), works as a nurse in a Mumbai hospital along with a younger nurse, Anu (Divya Prabha), and an older cook, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam). Prabha, who seems to be in her late 30s, is reserved, industrious, solicitous, with a gentle, no-nonsense bedside manner and a husband abroad whom she hasn’t seen in a very long time. She has a melancholic smile and large, deep-set eyes that often focus inward, which makes her seem lost in thought. She’s rooted in her life, yet when her gaze wanders she looks like she’s being pulled away from her everyday concerns by internal struggles.
Written and directed by Payal Kapadia, “All We Imagine as Light” centers on Prabha during a quietly fraught period. Anu, who’s also her roommate, is having an affair with a young man, a relationship that she’s trying and failing to keep hidden. Other nurses have started to gossip about Anu, including to Prabha, who briskly and perhaps protectively dismisses the chatter. At the same time, Prabha is also trying to help Parvaty, who’s widowed, find a legal way to stay in the apartment she lived in with her husband. “That’s life,” a character says early on. “You better get used to impermanence.”
“All We Imagine as Light” doesn’t have a strong narrative. Instead, things happen much as they do in life, in fits and starts, and the movie’s themes and ideas surface in conversational bits and in seemingly disconnected pieces. It isn’t always clear how these various elements work together, though in time clusters of ideas form regarding women, marriage, sex, loss, loneliness and love. In one scene, Anu advises an overwhelmed mother on birth control; in another, Anu and Prabha learn that their cat is pregnant. Every person and object resonates with meaning that, like pieces of a mosaic, contributes to the overall picture.
There are two separate scenes in “All We Imagine as Light,” roughly nine minutes apart, in which Prabha gets out of bed at night during a rainstorm. On the first occasion, she wakes, then glances at a rice cooker that had arrived earlier with no return address or note. The only clue to its sender are the words “Made in Germany.” “Doesn’t your husband live there?” Anu had asked Prabha, who didn’t answer. Prabha is a quiet, private woman. Now, though, in the dark, she reveals a side of herself (to you, at least) by reading a poem from a male admirer, a doctor, as she sits before an open window, her body framed by the velvety black night.
As she reads alone near the window, you hear the doctor speaking softly in voice-over: “My dreams are made of everyday things,” he says, “small and scattered, that I’ve left behind.”
The words “everyday things” open a door onto Kapadia’s method and how she distills meaning from life. These words also help set up the second scene — the one that transforms everything — in which Prabha again rises from her bed at the night. This next awakening opens with the camera panning over one of Anu’s bare legs to show her asleep in her bed; it looks like she’s kicked off her covers. On the soundtrack, you hear the ethereally beautiful piano that had been playing in the preceding scene, which ended with Anu and her boyfriend passionately kissing. Like the piano music, the heat of that kiss lingers in the new scene.
It’s pouring out and windy, and rain is streaming in through an open window. Prabha leaves her bed and, struggling against the wind, shuts the window with labored breath. In the next shot, she is squatting in the kitchen, mopping up the wet floor with a cloth. The camera is close to the ground, as if it were crouching next to her. She pauses and leans forward to pull the rice cooker from behind a curtain. As she drags the cooker to the middle of the kitchen, the camera shifts a bit so that the cooker is centered in the shot like a beacon. It’s caught her attention; now, it demands yours, too. When Prabha stops moving the cooker, the camera shifts once more so that you can again see her face in profile.
She continues pulling the rice cooker toward her ever so carefully. As she does, she begins to lean back into a seated position with her legs bent, so that her knees now point up. She then relaxes her legs so that they flank the rice cooker. As she does, Prabha leans her head and upper body over the pot and begins encircling it with her arms. She stays in that position for a few beats, her head hovering above the pot, her hands clasping it tightly, as if she were cradling it in an embrace. Her head moves back and forth over the pot, nuzzling it, and all you hear now are her heavy, palpably sad exhalations.
In a few intimate minutes, as she does throughout “All We Imagine as Light,” Kapadia has turned the ordinary into the extraordinary. When Prabha holds the rice cooker, it’s as if she were clinging to some trace of her husband. More crucially, it also seems to awaken desire in a more general sense. We surround ourselves with things, most are forgettable and mute, in that they don’t speak to us in any significant fashion. Yet there are other objects — a vase owned by a friend, say, or a book that a loved one once gave us — that are imbued with a near-mystic power for us. The world sends us all kinds of mysterious messages, we just need to remain open, as Prabha is here, to what they’re telling us.
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