'All We Imagine As Light' is Luminous and Lyrical

India's first winner of the Cannes Grand Prix is full of tender poetry.

"You have to believe in the illusion, or you'll go mad." So says an anonymous speaker in Payal Kapadia's glittering All We Imagine As Light. The film opens on documentary footage of Mumbai's hustle and bustle, accompanied by voiceovers from real people who moved to the metropolis seeking work. With more than a touch of melancholy in their voices, they reflect on the city's beguiling, disorienting effect — in their words, Mumbai is "the city of illusions," where survival depends on how much you buy into the mirage.

Another disembodied voice tells us that Mumbai seems to have the power to warp the laws of the universe: "I don't know how long has passed. The city takes time away from you… you better get used to impermanence." But Kapadia's debut fiction feature, which won the Cannes Grand Prix, works like a quietly powerful act of resistance to that enforced transience. Amidst the whirl of activity and life in the city, All We Imagine As Light zeroes in on the interlinked stories of three Mumbai transplants, grounding itself in the minutiae of their lives as if to press upon us just how solid and full their existence — and, by extension, that of everyone else on the grind in Mumbai — is. It's as if Kapadia's movie could close with a riff on the famous last line from 1948's The Naked City: "There are 21 million stories in the city of illusions. This has been three of them."

At its essence, this is a movie about the human connections serendipitously forged by the city, even while it threatens to overwhelm them. If those opening voiceovers seemed at all ominous, Kapadia subverts that effect to craft a gentle but still-powerful meditation on the way three women resist being swallowed up by the big smoke — a meditation that unfolds like a tender poem.

Having moved to Mumbai for work, Keralan nurses Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) find themselves sharing a small apartment, along with a pregnant stray cat they've adopted. Prabha is the older of the two and has the world-weariness to show for it: though married for some time at the arrangement of her parents, she hasn't heard from her husband since he emigrated to Germany to find work a year ago. There's a romantic connection kindling with a doctor colleague at her hospital, but she can't bring herself to move on, especially when she receives a reminder of her husband in the form of a gleaming new rice-cooker that mysteriously arrives in the post from Germany. In contrast, her childlike roommate Anu hasn't yet had her spirit subdued by disappointment, and can't imagine marrying a stranger — in fact, she already intends to marry her boyfriend (Hridhu Haroon), a plan that causes some scandal given that he is Muslim and she is not (interfaith relationships being stigmatised in their society).

In strict screen-time terms, the film leans closer to being Prabha and Anu's story, but it's their widowed colleague Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) who transforms the film from simple drama into something gently, beautifully radical. Despite raising her now-grown children in her home in the city, Parvaty is being threatened with eviction by property developers who want to clear her shanty neighbourhood and build a shiny tower for luxury living in its place. Lacking any deeds for the property with which to mount a legal protest, a defeated Parvaty echoes the movie's opening narration when she laments that "you only seem to be real if you have papers" in Mumbai. But Prabha refuses to let her give in to that sense of invisibility and, for moral support, joins her at a meeting to protest the forced evictions, where a union leader reminds attendees that "ours are the hands that built this city." His words push back firmly against an "unspoken code" in Mumbai that one of those earlier voiceovers laid out: "Even if you live in the gutter, you’re not allowed to feel anger."

Though Kapadia takes a modest view of just how much change the residents can affect — Parvaty does indeed wind up leaving Mumbai — that reminder of the power of solidarity is enough to empower Prabha into envisioning an alternative, a suggestion that blooms when she and Anu accompany Parvaty back to her home village. Away from the bright lights and buzz of monsoon-season Mumbai, All We Imagine As Light undertakes a shimmering transfiguration, as the dreamy atmosphere of the beachside village sets the tone for a hallucinatory moment in which Prabha is finally able to reconnect with her estranged husband.

It's to Kapadia's credit that this moment never feels tonally out of step with the rest of the movie; just as the women find their own subtle ways to resist succumbing to the city's effect, the director never lets the frenetic rhythm of city life dictate that of the film. Though cinematographer Ranabir Das doesn't shy away from capturing Mumbai's liveliness — from its busy streets to its cramped public transport — he finds an affectionate intimacy in all this activity, allowing the film to take on a remarkably gentle flow, even in these city scenes.

Rather than a mere aesthetic adornment, the movie's images are crucial to its humanistic outlook: it’s simultaneously honest about the realities of the women's lives while also opening our eyes to the million-and-one beauties the city contains. The protest meeting, the awe-inducing lights of the city's high rises, the way Prabha pulls her husband's rice cooker into an embrace, the ultrasound she and Anu beg a doctor colleague to perform on their darling cat… everything here feels enlightened and enlightening. Settling into All We Imagine As Light's warm, generous gaze is easy — it's leaving it that's difficult.