A luminous slice of Mumbai life in ‘All We Imagine as Light’

18/11/2024

The rhythms of bustling, working-class Mumbai are brought to vivid life in “All We Imagine as Light.” The stunning narrative debut of filmmaker Payal Kapadia explores the lives of three women in the city whose existence is mostly transit and work. Even that isn’t always enough to get by and pay the rent. One of the women, a widow, recently retired from working her whole life at a city hospital, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), is even facing eviction.

The other two, roommates and co-workers in the maternity ward are in different parts of life. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) has a husband from an arranged marriage who she doesn’t see and rarely speaks to. His life, we learn, is in Germany. She gets an occasional, ominous physical reminder of his existence in objects, like a fancy rice maker, that arrives one day. But she carries the weight of her arrangement everywhere, an invisible anchor on her being.

Anu (Divya Prabha) is even younger, trying to figure out what her life is going to look like and already in something of an impossible situation: She’s fallen in love with Shiz (Hridhu Haroon), who is Muslim. She’s Hindu. But in a city of over 20 million, a secret relationship can have some room to grow. Yes, they’re hiding this from their families, a burden in and of itself, but in the night markets with the city glimmering and moving around them, they’re able to just be.

By LINDSEY BAHR (AP)