All We Imagine as Light – A sensitive portrait of three women struggling to survive in modern Mumbai All We Imagine as Light review – A sensitive portrait of three women struggling to survive in modern Mumbai

Two of the women are nurses, colleagues in the specialist maternity unit, and the third, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), an elderly cook at the clinic, is the only one to have children. Anu (Divya Prabha, pictured below, Along with the youngest, Kani Kusruti, is a lively young woman on the verge of sexual intercourse with Shiaz (Hridu Haroon), a scatter-brained young Muslim man. He shares a bedroom with Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a married woman whose husband has moved away to work in a factory in Germany and has not contacted her for over a year.

Before delving into the women’s lives, Kapadia’s camera takes us on a trawl through the streets of Mumbai; Here people sell goods on the roadside, run in large crowds on the streets, and cram themselves into buses. The camera moves at the speed of a bus, taking in the crowds without stopping; This brings to mind the fast pace of life in Mumbai and the large number of people living there side by side. In the voice-overs, we hear the views of real locals who bemoan the lack of places to live, the scarcity of good jobs elsewhere, the high cost of living in the city but also the excitement it can bring, the rush of time.

On a packed bus where a woman is calmly sorting beans, we focus on Prabha as she suddenly and flawlessly heads to work, her big dark eyes scanning everything around her without any visible reaction. A calm presence, if not calm. It becomes clear that he is a linchpin for his colleagues, the one who solves difficult patients like the old woman haunted by her dead husband, who seems to her to have no legs now but still gives off the familiar scent of his tobacco. Prabha helps Partavy get legal advice, keeps a sisterly eye on Anu, teaches Hindi to an expat doctor, and even gets that doctor to give her an ultrasound scan at the clinic when a pregnant cat settles in a box outside her flat.

This is a sensitive work about the judgment of women in a social order that does not consider women equal to men. It is neither sentimental nor harsh, and continues to delve into the material with the determination to solve women’s problems. Anu, with modern ideas but traditional parents, faces an arranged marriage; Prabha struggles with the absence of her partner, unable to reach anyone (it’s clear that her doctor friend is attracted to her); Parvaty is a widow facing eviction from her home of 22 years, which developers want to demolish to build “prestigious” flats. The graphic of the site’s young and beautiful ideal tenants stacked outside grimly signals that these homes are not designed to be affordable for people like her. Thanks to this intergenerational trio, we can see the tight parameters of their world. We are loaded with men who will not have a vasectomy; confined to low-level, often unsavory roles in the workplace hierarchy, inevitably needing to treat male doctors with respect at all times; trapped in loveless marriages or rendered invisible during widowhood. As if a signal from a foreign, “international” world, a German-made electric rice cooker arrives anonymously for Prabha, one of the strangest love symbols possible; What is even stranger and sadder is that, one sleepless night, she took him out of his box and held him between her legs like a loved one. Her doctor friend is pushing for a relationship, but she’s stuck in a ghost marriage.

Anu has reached her own predicament, exemplified by a gallery of would-be husbands from a dating app waiting for her; A quietly funny parade of smug BS mongers, reeking of entitlement. She is so committed to Shiaz that she is preparing to buy herself a burqa and attend a family wedding with it. Most unluckily, she discovers that Parvaty does not legally exist and needs her dead husband’s papers to prove her tenancy. Even though he sits on a mountain of trash and opens boxes and crates, he finds nothing; Meanwhile, developers are cutting off its electricity and building higher. He and the increasingly politically conscious Prabha, stunned by their own audacity, demonstrate their growing discontent with the status quo in a satisfyingly concrete way.Then the film suddenly introduces unexpected pauses and sends its characters on a detour. The catalyst for this is Parvaty’s decision to return to her coastal village south of Mumbai, living in a crude shack and working as a cook. The other two women also follow Anu’s boyfriend. The village is the anti-Mumbai, a quiet world of fishermen where residents stare out at the vast empty ocean. While Mumbai is a city of illusions that its residents must embrace to survive, the village gives women space to breathe, drink, dance and dream. After helping treat a washed-up sailor, Prabha has a dream come true; This scene turns into a fantastic scene that expresses all his repressed emotions.

It’s not an epic epiphany, but it’s still important by sober standards. Kapadia leaves her and the other women’s fates unresolved, but the final image shows them in a fairy-light-lit paradise that smoothes the hustle and bustle of their city lives – but can this magic be sustained? Can Anu (pictured above) did you find the strength to escape your threatened arranged marriage? Should he? Could Prabha’s growing union activism bring vital change to women’s lives? How can unfortunates like Parvaty prevent powerful economic forces from ruining her life? Kapadia works indirectly, gently moving characters between scenarios without overtly editorializing them. He seems fully aware of Mumbai’s possibilities as well as its disadvantages. A sensitive and gripping debut, beautifully acted and sensitively directed.

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