Express At Cannes: Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light is a meditative soliloquy on loneliness and connection

I can’t deny that watching it at the first press show in Cannes was a matter of pride first and foremost, and then came the real job of separating the sobriquets ‘first Indian female director in Cannes competition/first Indian film after thirty years’, from the film itself, which is a meditative soliloquy on loneliness and connection, featuring striking performances from Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha, and solid supporting acts from Chhaya Kadam and Hridhu Haroon.

As the city which famously never sleeps but does succumb to the darkness of night, Mumbai stirring itself, preparing for dawn, getting moving on local trains, is a familiar sight. But in Kapadia’s film the trains are a crucial constant presence, as they carry Prabha (Kusruti) and Anu (Prabha) to their hospital, where work is, and then back to their tiny room for rest and respite.

As one of them says, who wouldn’t want to come to Mumbai where there are jobs and money? It is a statement which belies the constant struggle of its citizens to acquire a roof over their heads– Kadam plays Parvaty, a woman who has no ‘kaagaz’ to prove that she has lived in her house for over twenty years. The demolition squad is at her doorstep, and the prosperous lawyer Prabha takes Parvaty to is sympathetic to her cause, but says that there’s nothing he can do.

The dynamic between the older, much more conservative Prabha, who was ‘married off’ by her parents, and the younger, friskier Anu who has a ‘Muslim’ boy-friend (Haroon), shifts registers as we go along. What is Prabha’s husband doing in Germany, and why doesn’t he keep in touch? Is he even there? Kusruti, who has been wowing us with her recent performances, is just lovely, conveying a sense of loss with an economy of gesture and glance. Divya Prabha, allowed to be more expansive, both contrasts and complements her: both are women trying to discover their sense of self.

It is the fragility of these lives, and the tensile strength of these connections, which uses the city as a living, breathing palimpsest, that Kapadia weaves through her narrative. When the three women leave the big city for a short layover in a beautiful village by the sea, the claustrophobic spaces that they have been constrained in, opens up to the water, groves, and caves. It also leads the film into moments which are almost metaphysical.

ALSO READ | Express at Cannes: Being Maria can fuel up the on-again-off-again conversation around #MeToo

Some things happen here which do not appear to add up: is the near-dead man saved from drowning by Prabha, anyone she has known? These parts are left ambiguous, but that ambiguity is central to the fine-grained texture of the film. The constant tinkle of piano music does call attention to itself in places but there isn’t any doubt that Kapadia has come up with a film that’s special: it plays with light and texture, and form and content, in a singular observational style which is both sparse and lush, harrowing and hopeful.

Much like Kapadia’s previous work, All We Imagine As Light is shot through with deep political and feminist hues. But there’s nothing strident about how the director, whose ‘A Night Of Knowing Nothing’ won the top documentary prize here in Cannes three years ago, weaves in these strands. There’s a gentleness to this film, but it is also piercing, and a lot of the magic is created by Ranabir Das’ stellar cinematography.

The sisterhood of these women, who come together to give each other the support they need, at the exact time they need it, is the overriding factor which rounds things off. In parts poetic, in others prosaic, the light shines through.