‘All We Imagine as Light’: A glowing tale of sisterhood in modern India

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With the delicacy and power of a good short story, Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light” brings us into the lives of people we might otherwise never consider and brings us out richer for the experience. The first film from India to win the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, it has also picked up steam on the awards-season circuit, a rising acclaim that may overshadow the movie’s subtle, perceptive charms. Making her fictional feature debut as a writer-director, Kapadia unveils a storytelling style that whispers rather than shouts and whose empathy for the unseen women among us is a balm to the soul.

The women in question are three nurses in Mumbai, two of them roommates – the stoic, shy Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), who’s younger, bolder, more modern – and an older co-worker, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), who’s being forced out of her apartment by developers. The urban sprawl of Mumbai is as much a character as the women are, and Kapadia fills the opening minutes of “All We Imagine as Light” with the voices of a city that, like New York, pulls a reversed diaspora toward it like filings to a magnet. The voices speak in the many languages of India – Gujarati, Bhojpuri, Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, Hindi, Tamil – and they testify to Mumbai as a place to escape heartbreak, to send money back home, to rob a person of time, to belong without quite belonging.

So it is with Prabha and Anu. The former has a husband she barely knows from an arranged marriage; he’s working in Germany, and she hasn’t heard from him in over a year. Early in the movie, a gift from him arrives in the form of a fancy rice cooker that’s too big for the women’s modest kitchen; it’s stored under the sink, where, one night, a disconsolate Prabha takes it out and embraces it the way you might smell the sweater of someone you miss.

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At the run-down but efficient hospital where they work, Prabha is a model of hardworking kindness, professional and too reserved to gossip or go to the movies with the other nurses. She’s flattered by the attentions of a courtly visiting doctor (Azees Nedumangad) but too proper to do anything about it. Anu, by contrast, has a taste for flashy clothes and music and can shock Prabha with her flirtatiousness. Her secret – which everyone in the hospital except Prabha seems to know – is that she’s seeing a young Muslim man, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon). In India’s regimented society, where you only date someone you’re going to marry and Hindus don’t marry Muslims, Anu is courting scandal.

“All We Imagine as Light” cooks along quietly for a while, sustained by the director and cinematographer Ranabir Das’s eye for composition – a shot of Prabha against a nighttime window, the city distant and alive beyond her, is still imprinted on my retinas – and by the slowly building tensions between the roommates. Prabha, Anu and Parvaty are all in limbo, saving other people’s lives while waiting for their own to happen, and the implication is that this is the naturally unnatural state of existence in Mumbai. “You’d better get used to impermanence,” one of those voices says at the beginning. Limbo never ends.

Except in “All We Imagine as Light,” it does. In the film’s final third, Parvaty loses her battle with the builder, and the other two accompany her back to her rural seaside village down the coast from Mumbai to help her set up house. There, the simmering fever breaks. Anu and Shiaz connect with a wellspring of erotic love far more ancient than any city, and Prabha has a reconciliation with the husband who’s not there, his empty outline filled in via a ghostly bit of magical realism that’s too good and too weird to spoil.

Throughout the film, the piano music of the late Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou ripples like a secret passed between friends. Likewise, “All We Imagine as Light” is the kind of movie one experiences in solitude even when sharing it with others. As with dwellers in a great metropolis, it makes strangers and accomplices of us all.

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Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.

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Three and one-half stars. Unrated. At theaters. Contains brief nudity. 118 minutes.

(Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars okay, one star poor, no stars waste of time.)

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