All We Imagine as LightA film focusing on the round of desires that hovers in a constant state of grace and marks the birth of a great filmmaker.
It was in the final hours of an official competition that wasn’t very generous with major highlights, that a great light finally appeared. After A Night of Knowing Nothing, a documentary on revolt and love that had already bowled us over with its political and romantic scope, All We Imagine as Light marks Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s first foray into fiction – and, more generally, the first foray since 1994 of an Indian film in the official competition.
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However, this entry into the world of fiction is not a complete change of scenery. The filmmaker’s camera pulls back from the crowded streets of Mumbai and, right from the prologue, proclaims her still vigorous attachment to the documentary form. From the very first seconds, the film scrutinizes the hustle and bustle of the city and finds itself pierced through by different inner voices. Thoughts and moods overlap, drawing an intimate portrait of the suddenly not-so-anonymous crowd.
In the midst of this crowd, Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a young nurse, emerges. She’s focused and leads an untroubled life at the hospital. Anu, her young roommate, is more rebellious. Two mirror-image lives that become entangled in a common quest. Beneath Prabha’s impassive mask lies a lost love, a grief she cannot heal from. The worst of doubts agitates her: did this love ever really exist? As in A Night of Knowing Nothing, it’s a matter of a lost lover whose ghost wanders secretly in the image’s fumes. Meanwhile, Anu (Divya Prabha) is secretly seeing a young Muslim boy whom she loves madly.
With this double portrait of thwarted love, the film follows the beginning and end of a love story in parallel, from the first flutters of the heart to the grief and acceptance that come last. Through this to-and-fro, the film describes the broad, contradictory trajectory of love. Structured as a diptych leading from the city to the countryside, from urban effervescence to calmed nature, All We Imagine as Light follows a movement of regeneration. The film is a perfect loop that probes the capacity of characters to dry their tears, heal their wounds, without forgetting or regretting for whom and for what their hearts beat. Dazzling in its sensuality and elegance, the film manages to capture even the most prosaic material (a rice cooker), transforming it into a sublime piece of poetry, an enchanting capsule that conveys the emotional fragility of its characters. Payal Kapadia uses her camera like a stethoscope, taking hold of it to let us hear the internal pulsations of bodies.
The depiction of the city as an alienating yet bewitching monster evokes the masters, most notably Wong Kar Wai. The viewer’s senses are overstimulated through a prodigious intuition when it comes to camera use. Letting the many unforeseen events of reality enter the field – the appearance of a color, a face or a sound – the film does not create its own universe; it doesn’t tame the world, but listens to it and observes it with great care.
Rarely has the Mumbai of today appeared to us in such a way, intertwining love stories at the same time as it excludes its most precarious inhabitants from living them. A relentless violence that one of the characters will pay for when they have to leave the city and return to the countryside. Then begins a second, stranger film, carnal and mystical. A forest, then a cave, finally welcome the possibility of desire for Anu and her young lover, while Prabha begins her slow reconstruction. Initially isolated, the two characters come together in communion, embodying a magnificent sisterhood. A wall erected in solidarity in response to the violence of the world around them.
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