Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light
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On the latest episode of The Last Thing I Saw, Nicolas Rapold has a terrific conversation with Amy Taubin about several of the films she’s seen at this year’s New York Film Festival, including RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, the two well and truly final films by Jean-Luc Godard (though others made earlier may appear in some form in the future), Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me, Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, and two documentaries no distributor seems to want to get anywhere near, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor’s No Other Land and Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s Union. The emphasis throughout the hour and a half is on directorial choices, but at one point, Taubin mentions that, for her, the two outstanding performances at this year’s NYFF are Zhao Tao’s in Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides and Kani Kusruti’s in Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light.
Kusruti plays Prabha, the head nurse at a hospital in Mumbai, where she shares an apartment with a considerably younger coworker, Anu (Divya Prabha). In a dispatch to the Notebook from Cannes, where All We Imagine as Light won the Grand Prix, Leonardo Goi points out that both women are “transplants from Kerala for whom impermanence is now an inescapable condition. It stands to reason then that Kapadia should capture Mumbai not through instantly recognizable landmarks but via a handful of liminal spaces: buses, trains, markets, and hospital rooms. Everything here suggests transition, a rootlessness that has both spatial and temporal connotations.” The first half of the film, “set in a crepuscular Mumbai forever plagued by monsoons, is also the most elliptical.”
“Few films have ever so beautifully captured the lonesome romance of Mumbai after dark,” writes Jessica Kiang in Variety, and the Telegraph’s Tim Robey finds that the city, as captured by Kapadia and cinematographer Ranabir Das, is “put on screen in a manner barely attempted in cinema before, bathed in a shivery, rather secretive nocturnal melancholy.” And both women do have their secrets. Prabha has been keeping one from herself. Years ago, her husband from an arranged marriage left to find work in Germany. It’s been over a year since she’s heard from him, and Prabha is only gradually allowing herself to realize that he may never call on her to join him as he said he would. The arrival from Germany of a bright red rice cooker without a single word attached only confounds her puzzlement.
Anu, in the meantime, sneaks off when she can to meet the boyfriend her Hindu family must never know about. Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon) is Muslim. “With her editors, Clément Pinteaux and Jeanne Sarfati, Kapadia uses the city as punctuation between the events of her character’s lives,” writes Sophie Monks Kaufman at IndieWire. “From lights that spread out like a carpet of electronic stars to Anu and Shiaz standing together as the motions of a commuter train rock them into grazing contact, these are the lulls that cast a spell on our senses.”
Anu and Shiaz’s clandestine relationship echoes the love story at the center of Kapadia’s first feature, A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), which layers readings of letters written by a Hindu film student to the Muslim lover who has disappeared from her life over footage shot during a monthslong strike by students protesting the Modi administration’s appointment of a Hindu nationalist as the new head of the Film and Television Institute of India. “Only a few seconds into Payal Kapadia‘s shimmery, poetic essay doc A Night of Knowing Nothing, it feels like we are a few hours deep into the excavation of someone else’s memories,” wrote Jessica Kiang after the film won the Golden Eye, the award for the best nonfiction film at Cannes. Through the end of this month, you’ll find A Night of Knowing Nothing on the Criterion Channel.
In All We Imagine as Light, Prabha’s close friend Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is being forced out of her Mumbai apartment by real estate speculators, and so she decides to move back to her hometown by the sea. Both Prabha and Anu have their reasons for joining her, and the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw finds “something epiphanic in the later scenes and mysterious final moments” of the film.
In July, Leonardo Goi interviewed Kapadia—who, by the way, lists fifty favorite films for LaCinetek on Letterboxd—and she told him that “the way I make films, whatever plan I may have laid out always goes out of the window once I start editing.” Throughout the process, “I never know where I’ll end up . . . If I knew exactly where a film will take me, it’d be a very boring one to make.” Kapadia, who will take part in Q&As in New York on Monday and Tuesday and in a conversation with Miguel Gomes (Grand Tour) on Wednesday, has made this year’s Time100 Next list, and for actor Ayushmann Khurrana, her “authenticity and her lens on reality are part of what makes her work so rare.”
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