If you can get across one major challenge in the plot of All We Imagine As Light towards the end of the film, then Payal Kapadia’s sensually vibrant rigorously uncontaminated view of Mumbai’s dispassionate dingy working-class nightlife is easy to embrace as something truly special.
A film about commuting characters in Mumbai which doesn’t flatter to deceive. Kapadia’s cameraman Ranabir Das takes in all the stench and the endless chaos with a sighing, reverent, arching view.
The ‘lens’ said, the better.
The actors don’t speak like actors. They talk. They don’t spew lines. They say whatever they have to say, and not what we would like to hear.
Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) are nurses in a low-maintenance hospital who are also roommates. Their life is no bed of roses for sure. The smell all around them assails us. Not that they are asking us to be a part of their lives.Still,there is no escaping the stench of a dying city,filling the empty spaces in the population’s heart with false promises and lots of noises.
Oh, the din of the raat never ends! K A Abbas had once swooped into it in a film titled Bambai Raat Ki Baahon Mein. Payal Kapadia leans into Mumbai’s chaos with a rigour and enthusiasm that seem more a necessity than a desire.
At the prologue we are taken through a sweeping view of migrants in Mumbai, talking about themselves. One of them, from Bihar, speaks in Maithili. Another tells us that he fled from his home because of the stench…
The sense of moving from one chaos to another is preserved in Kapadia’s intriguing narration, like something unpleasant but precious. We move from Prabha’s dark despondent world (she has been abandoned by an absentee husband) to Anu’s not-so-darkened existence: Anu has a life — a caring horny boyfriend Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon). Anu is a creature of the night. She grabs all the experiences that life has for her.
Both the ladies move to a coastal village with Parvati (Chhaya Kadam) who is the third cog in the wheel of misfortune.
Here is where the “problematic” experience happens to Prabha. She rescues a stranger (Anand Sami) from drowning and then has an imaginary conversation with him where he is the absconding husband come to heel.
This is the only time we see Prabha happy. We are inclined to let her be with her fantasy. She has earned it.
All We Imagine As Light is an experience that leaves us with mixed feelings. Its original fecund language of expression is incontestably exciting. But it can also be exasperating at times for the very same reason that it is exciting. The actors are all so oblivious of the camera, the film seems not to be aspiring to anything principally cinematic.
And yet there Topshe’s background music challenging us to not leave our seats. The sound is so sophisticated, so at odds with the characters and milieu. And yet we are not complaining. All We Imagine As Light doesn’t give us an opportunity to challenge its storytelling vagaries. It is that kind of a film.
