In top-notch Indian film, three Mumbai women encounter what makes a life worth living

“All We Imagine as Light,” the marvelous new movie written and directed by Payal Kapadia, opens in Mumbai with documentary-style footage showing the huddled and the displaced. In this teeming Indian metropolis, only impermanence is permanent. It has been called a city of dreams, but, in the course of the film, it comes to resemble a city of illusions.

Following this overview, the film – winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, that festival’s second-highest honor – settles into an extended narrative involving three women. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is the head nurse at a local hospital, Anu (Divya Prabha) is a student nurse and Prabha’s young roommate, and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is a widowed cook at the hospital who is facing eviction from her apartment of more than 20 years because of urban redevelopment.

High among the film’s many standout virtues is how fully Kapadia has captured the faces of this trio. This is her first dramatic feature, and no doubt her previous background as a documentarian helped account for such searching portraiture. Every time we are shown a close-up of the women, something new and resonant – in their eyes, their half smiles – is revealed.

Prabha moved to Mumbai years ago from her home state of Kerala in southwestern India. Her husband left her for a job in Germany not long after their arranged marriage ceremony. She has not heard from him in over a year. Anu, a more recent Hindi arrival from Kerala, is carrying on a clandestine relationship with, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), who is Muslim. A typical text message to him reads, “I’m sending you kisses through the clouds.” Enraptured, she is willing to go undercover and don a burka so they can rendezvous in his neighborhood.

Prabha, acting as a sort of mentor to Anu, disapproves of the young woman’s free-spiritedness. Theirs is a generational divide, but Prabha also recognizes Anu’s youthful dreams. She likely once shared them. Her traditionalism is not hard-edged. Talking about Prabha’s lapsed husband, Anu asks her, “How could you marry a total stranger?” Prabha answers, “People you know can become strangers, too.”

Prabha’s pose of remaining a faithful wife, if only in absentia, is tested by a smitten physician in the hospital, Dr. Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), who sends her poems. What appears to connect them most strongly is a sense of loneliness in the big city. But he is extraordinarily respectful of her, and, given her principled unwillingness to succumb to his blandishments, he humbly moves on.

Movies this female-centric not infrequently skimp on the manner in which men are portrayed. They come across as two-dimensional adjuncts to the action in much the same way as when the male-female balance is reversed. But Kapadia doesn’t fall into that trap. Her equable humanism is a gift she shares with that greatest of all Indian directors, the late Satyajit Ray. Dr. Manoj is a fully rounded, immensely sympathetic character. So is Shiaz, who seems quite as enraptured as Anu – and as wary of their union. In a sequence near the end, trembling with happiness, they steal away to the seaside.

That jaunt involves all three of the women. Parvaty, having been evicted, has retreated to the village where she grew up. She asks Prabha and Anu to help her move, and they are more than pleased to flee the urban chaos. It is here that we see them at their most easeful. They have created a kind of makeshift family and they seem replenished by a sense of possibility, however momentary.

Earlier in the movie, Prabha tells Anu that “You can’t escape your fate,” but the harsh prohibitions of Indian society seem to dissipate in this landscape. Their repose is a fragrant illusion, but they want it to last. We want it to last, too. We want these good people to be favored. 

Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. “All We Imagine as Light” is not rated. It is in Malayalam, Hindi, and Marathi, with English subtitles.