All We Imagine As Light

Saturday March 8 @ 1:30 pm

Drama / Romance
1 hr 58 min – Not rated

All we Imagine as Light is the quiet, surprise masterpiece of 2024. Filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s drama about three generations of women dealing with love, lust and loss in modern-day Mumbai is like a sneak attack on your soul. “The city takes time away from you,” an unseen voice says, near the beginning of the film: “You’d better get used to impermanence.” The city in question is Mumbai, which an opening montage presents as a monsoon-season metropolis filled with clashing dialects, crushes of crowds and a tropical level of heat. The film’s story is a heartwarming ode to the strength of its characters, each of whom lives outside societal norms in some way and struggles to come to terms with their current situations. The drama boasts stellar performances from its cast and allows us to sit in their feelings as they navigate changes affecting their lives while supporting each other.

Loneliness is the real subject, and emotional/geographical dislocation, all of the characters having come from elsewhere: Mumbai is a crowded polyglot city of transplants. The film opens before sunrise with a lengthy panning shot of people setting up small sidewalk markets, unloading produce and other goods off of trucks, the city already wide awake. Everything is movement: cars, crowds, trains. People speak in voiceover, establishing Mumbai – its Edward-Hopper-esque urban loneliness, as the movie’s real subject. “There’s always the feeling I’ll have to leave.” “In Mumbai, there is work and money.” Living in Mumbai one must “get used to impermanence.”

Compassionate and tender, the film’s power comes in its focus on the three women’s multigenerational relationship and the support they provide each other when they need it the most. The three women each encompass different personalities and demeanors, their varied ages and life experiences informing their unique outlooks on life and the actions they take in situations. It’s a slice-of-life story driven by characters and intimacy. The women are trapped in an in-between state; they’re not settled and the changing tapestry of Mumbai doesn’t make it easy to call it home.

We get the sense that these characters are passing through, on the way to whatever might be more permanent and stable. In other ways, it’s simultaneously a love letter and an indictment of Mumbai, a city with fissures and a glossy mask to hide behind but that is no less bustling and wondrous. The film’s evocative title describes the experience of watching it, how the nocturnal insomniac mood is sparked with distant colored lights, and how moving into the light requires “imagining.” Perhaps the light isn’t light, but it’s good enough if we imagine it so.