All We Imagine as Light starts with a changing view of the streets and slums of Mumbai from the perspective of a train passenger. There are some words of voiceover lightly establishing the film’s own perspectives, but nothing we can dig our teeth into at this point. This appears to be a glancing portrait of everyday city life, but it isn’t immediately clear why we’re seeing what we’re seeing.

The same thing can be said of the two main characters in Payal Kapadia’s film, Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), who are nurses living together in a Mumbai flat. We’re seeing their routines at work, learning a little bit about their backgrounds and relationships, but again, for a time, not really sure why this film is focusing on them and what is has to say about them.

Perhaps this is key to the creeping power of All We Imagine as Light, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year. To suggest that we can follow the story of any of the thousands of passing faces you might see on a train, and uncover quiet profundities similar to the ones presented here, is probably to ascribe too banal of an aesthetic purpose to All We Imagine as Light. Though certainly, that is part of the appeal. It’s probably closer to the truth to suggest that there’s a tension between the surface appearances of things – of people, of places – and their actual realities, enabling those profundities, and encapsulated in the film’s very title.

Prabha is the older of the two nurses, married to a man who has emigrated to Germany to work in a factory. The status of their marriage is unclear, though she does list it as a reason not to yield to the pursuit of a mild-mannered doctor at their hospital (Azees Nedumangad). The romantic confusion of her situation clearly makes her resentful towards Anu, who is more open and outgoing, and takes risks like being in an affair with a Mulsim man, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon). That isn’t so much a risk for her as for him, as she wouldn’t be accepted by his traditional family, so they have to keep their relationship on the down low.

The main driver of the plot, such as it is, is their older co-worker, the chef at the hospital, Parvaty (Chhaya Kardam). She’s being kicked out of her building because she has no documentation to prove the legitimacy of her 20+ years of residency, as the plan is to raze that building and put up a high rise in its place. So she plans to return to her coastal village in Ratnagari, and the two younger nurses accompany her to help resettle her.

The intentional structure of All We Imagine as Light starts to reveal itself over the running time, most explicitly in the form of the dualities it explores, and most explicitly in that regard in the divide between Mumbai and the countryside. The imagined light of the title refers to a sort of contained chaos of the big city, which its residents, particularly those who came there from somewhere else, must embrace as the promise of something fantastical and life-changing, though it rarely works out that way. More likely is that this is some sort of borrowed time, whisked out from under you as soon as the person who controls the illusion, metaphorically speaking, decides to turn your dwelling into a different sort of dream that can only be accessed by a specific sort of person.

But then there is also the central duality between Prabha and Anu, the former standing in as a representative of a more traditional India (her marriage was arranged), the latter a younger generation yearning to break free (Anu cannot envision such arbitrary predetermination, and is even dating outside of her religion to indicate her preference for love). In reality the actresses are only separated by five years, but their personalities and outlooks could not be more different – though they tend to approach each other more as the narrative flows.

Given the lack of high-concept narrative tension in the story, the film relies more than most on the strength of its peformers, and none more than Kusruti as Prabha. She does have a few moments when she gives voice to the conflicts and frustrations building up in her, but they come out sideways more than they directly put her emotions into words, as when she snaps at Anu for a transgression that would not ordinarily warrant it. Far more common is the slight creeping across her face of anguish and awareness, such as her realisation that she is unable to pursue a relationship with the sweet doctor at her hospital because she is married – though what kind of marriage is an open question, given that her husband lives in another country and never sees her. To say nothing of the fact that he wasn’t the person of her choosing to begin with, and maybe this man in front of her is more the sort she would have chosen.

The gradual increase in resonance gets a big push forward in the film’s final half-hour, during an episode of what we might call magical realism, nestled in with an overall grounding in realism. This is another way of metaphorically exploring what is stirring inside Prabha, and Kusruti is equal to the job and then some.

To the extent that it surfaces on the world stage at all, Indian cinema is far more likely to reach us in the form of films like RRR and last year’s Polite Society, which, if not always typical examples of the Bollywood form, are at least Bollywood adjacent, involving choreographed dancing or fighting or both. All We Imagine as Light is a reminder that there is also the potential for the country’s independent cinema, more resembling something like Iranian cinema, to penetrate through and reach us, both intellectually and emotionally. People who get lost in the passing crowds exist the world over, and thank goodness we have films like this to bring them into the light.

 

All We Imagine as Light opens in cinemas Boxing Day.