Dir/Wri: Payal Kapadia | Cast: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon | India Drama 110′
Writer-director Payal Kapadia‘s Mumbai set feature All We Imagine As Light was the first Indian film to compete for the Palme d’Or in nearly three decades; an impressive achievement for a first time filmmaker, especially an Indian woman who went on to win the Grand Prix in 2024.
The last time an Indian film made it into the main competition was Shaji N Karun’s Swaham in 1994. Sadly it went home empty-handed losing out to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Kapadia’s poetic yet powerful documentary, A Night of Knowing Nothing, won the Golden Eye for best documentary at Cannes in 2021.
Unfolding in two parts and shifting deftly from realism to reverie All We Imagine As Light centres on two women caught in impossible love stories in modern day Mumbai. Prabha, a nurse, shares a flat with Anu, yet they hardly know each other and are further constrained from forming a friendship due to shameful secrets that trap them from sharing their personal lives. Both women are disappointed by love, for differing reasons, and this emotional claustrophobia pervades the first part of the drama.
There’s nothing brash or bossy about these characters they both bear their difficulties with restraint and modesty. Anu, a Hindu, is in love with a Muslim man and forced to conceal her relationship due to societal constraints. All the two of them want is to make love but this is frowned upon, even nowadays.
Prabha is caught in an arranged marriage with a man who has since cleared off to his village. One day, out of the blue, a rice cooker arrives in the post, supposedly from her estranged husband. This innocent gift sends Prabha into a deep depression, opening up fresh wounds of romantic disillusionment and upsetting her emotional equilibrium once again. She is a married woman constrained by all the ties that it implies, but the disappearance of her husband leaving her lonely and desperate.
The second part of the film brings an uplifting almost dreamlike tonal shift that sees the women freed from their inertia when they set off on a road trip to a beach resort where a mystical forest creates space for dreams to be unleashed.
Kapadia’s film touches on traditional themes of abandonment, religious intolerance, female friendship and sexual liberation that are still all too relevant in today’s India with its impressive technical and financial advances: Men are free but many women are still sadly stuck in the dark ages. Meanwhile in the West men and women are enjoying the freedoms of gay marriage, gay parenthood, and sexual transitioning. A thoughtful, richly thematic and beautifully captured film enhanced by a magical score and two sensitive performances from leads Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha. @MeredithTaylor
IN CINEMAS FROM 23 NOVEMBER 2024