This review is part of Honi Soit’s continued coverage of the 71st Sydney Film Festival, 5-16 June. Read the rest of our reviews here.
While walking to the State Theatre, I almost forgot the name of Payal Kapadia’s film that won Cannes Film Festival’s Grand Prix in May, the first Indian film to appear in Cannes in 30 years. Rather serendipitously, I overheard a fellow Sydney Film Festival-goer tell his friend (and me) on the bus, “All We Imagine as Light” (2024). This remarkable film’s title initially blended into a generic and hackneyed arthouse landscape, but it soon became starkly embedded in my brain, etched like those flashes that linger behind eyelids after your vision is flooded with light.
The warm bulbs of the theatre, awash over a crowd in coats and scarves, drew me all the way to a red seat. As the bulbs dimmed to the siege of darkness, Kapadia’s nocturnal passage through Mumbai’s streets began. The theatre’s golden glow became usurped by the white glare of fluorescent street lights on-screen. The bustle of coats and scarves on Market St gave way to fruitsellers on roadside markets, the chatter of filmgoers with Malayali and Hindi tongues. You can live here for years, a woman’s voiceover warns, but still you always feel like your time might come to leave the city.
Kapadia evokes V.S. Naipaul’s story ‘One Out of Many’ from his novel, In a Free State (1971), in an inverted sense: Naipaul’s story of a man leaving Mumbai to work as a servant to his boss in Washington questions whether sacrificing Mumbai’s easygoing beauty to Western capitalistic sensibilities and skyscrapers was worth it. Naipaul’s character swims, and struggles to stay afloat, in the foreign sea of English language and visa documentation to avoid deportation. In Kapadia’s film, the main sisterly duo Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) are nurses hailing from Kerala, assimilating to Hindi with ease. Prabha chastises a doctor who writes her Malayali poetry for not picking up Hindi when he cites the language barrier as reason for going back home. Meanwhile, Prabha’s older friend Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is forcefully evicted by builders tasked with gentrifying the city. Despite living in her flat for 22 years and raising a child in it, Parvaty is unable to find documentation proving tenancy after her husband’s passing.
Notably, Kapadia’s film is the first ever film by a female Indian director to compete in Cannes’ main competition. Her feminist bent is apparent in the women-led ensemble who struggle with widowhood, absent husbands, and family pressure to have an arranged marriage. However, Kapadia is not cynical. The sisterly relationship between a younger, playful, Anu, and a more wise and selfless Prabha plays out with the same feel-good feeling as a girls night binge of Sex and the City. Anu’s interreligious star-crossed love with her Muslim boyfriend Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon) sparkles in buses and busy streets like Amélie and Nino in Montmartre. Mumbai is shot with Wong Kar-Wai’s lonely romanticism, the rain slicking the streets reminiscent of the neo-noir style he films Hong Kong in.
Dialogue, voiceover, and text messages are poetic, with Anu texting Shiaz to think of the raindrops as kisses falling on his lips. Jokes, albeit bittersweet, glimmer with hope and make the entire Sydney theatre laugh just as much as Indian audience members (the mention of Amitabh Bhachan’s dulcet tones seemed to transcend cultural barriers).
The film’s preoccupation is the loneliness of life in the city, and its symbiotic relationship with the anxiety of alienation; that instead of making a home in Mumbai, these villager-migrants will be swept away by the city’s torrential rain like rubbish in the streets. The romantic way All We Imagine as Light shoots a typically South Asian city made me feel Mumbai was the nexus of Sydney and my home city Chennai. As a migrant from Chennai in Tamil Nadu (Kerala’s neighbour), I worry I can never sink my teeth deep enough into Sydney to call it a home. The cinematography perfectly captures this feeling of sleepless anxiety: Prabha sits in her rented flat, whose kitchen tiles coldly reflect the blue of a late night, while watching a train snake through a sea of buildings with mosaics of warmly-lit windows. Those distant windows seem to burn like fireplaces in inviting homes. Prabha’s husband, working in Germany, hasn’t called in over a year. Perhaps there is a happily married couple and a child in one of those homes which Prabha wistfully looks at.
In a dreamlike sequence, Prabha and Anu are uprooted from their apartment to Parvaty’s beachside hometown. Juxtaposition of the idyllic warmth of this getaway, where Parvaty’s tree-shrouded home lacks even electricity, with the city’s mean glare of white tube lights, is heightened in the climax. In this jarring sequence, Kapadia brings us back to festivities in Mumbai, a shock of drum-beating and whistling and yelling, limbs dancing with orgiastic fervour. Firecrackers blast in shimmering illusions, maya, as a voiceover calls Mumbai’s lights.
The title is explained in a voiceover about a factory worker so overworked that he could barely imagine how daylight looked. An artifice of light floods the audience’s visuals meanwhile. Parvaty’s narration, melancholic and cynical, turns the joy of the crowd into a sinister hypnosis: the collective lie we’re made to believe in the city, she says, is that we’re not to complain about the squalor, the cramped inhospitality, the hostile glares, because even being in Mumbai is the dream we’re sold. The lights are delusions that enchant migrants like Prabha, Anu, and Parvaty.
Anu and her boyfriend savour their precious freedom together in Parvaty’s town, hidden in the thick forest and kissed by dappled sun through treetops. The way Kapadia shoots light is unsurprisingly beautiful, ethereal and gauzy in some moments, and golden and decadent in others. Away from the jungle of the city where they hid in crowds and carparks, Anu and Shiaz’s love deepens and becomes more honest. In a dark cave where countless young lovers must have visited, they confess their fears and love for each other. Soft dream-like piano punctuates these moments of young love and tender exchanges of friendship like when Prabha steps into the sea with Parvaty.
The film ends on this warm note, the moon and the rolling waves bearing witness to citydwellers finding homes not in precarious apartment complexes, but in the safe company of souls you can be truly at peace with.
