Petit Chaos
Of the many India-set films that premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, director Payal Kapadia’s feature debut is the only one that focuses on India and its distinctive features, focusing on its most populous city, Mumbai. Like London, Paris, and New York, Mumbai is a city of contrasts, a melting pot of castes and races, but where more than half of its 12.5 million residents are likely to live in extreme poverty. Everything we imagine is light It tells the stories of the poor who struggle to get by, their homes and their dignity as the city’s wealthy elite buy up and bulldoze their property.
The backdrop of Kapadia’s documentary is clear from the start, with a series of tracking shots through a bustling city market. The workers are all migrants from far-flung villages, and as their weary faces pass by, we hear their (clearly unscripted) innermost thoughts. “I didn’t realise so much time had passed. The city steals time,” one says. “You have to get used to impermanence,” warns another. A little later, Mumbai is declared a “city of illusions” and, “If you don’t believe in illusions, you’ll go mad.”
This intriguing foreshadowing shifts to a busy hospital where nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) works with her roommate Anu (Divya Prabha). Though both are Hindu, the two women are very different. Anu gets bored easily and is notoriously immodest, not paying her rent on time and being spotted hanging out with strangers who are assumed to be her boyfriends. But Prabha is the more sensible of the two, which is why after the bailiffs come and try to evict Prabha from her home to make way for an expensive new development, Parvati (Chhaya Kadam), the hospital’s widowed cook, goes to counsel Prabha.
Offering only a very vague narrative, the story begins in earnest when Prabha receives a gift in the mail: a high-tech rice cooker that appears to have come from Germany, where her husband works and lives. There was no note or anything on it, and none of it mattered to Prabha, who is struggling to make ends meet in her husband’s absence and upset by the attention she received from a visiting doctor.
Meanwhile, Anu lays it all out and rebels against her parents who bombard her with cheesy images of potential husbands from a Hindi dating app, unaware that she is secretly dating a Muslim (“How can you marry a stranger?” she wonders). When it becomes clear that Parvati, like many in the city, has no proof of her home and is no match for the landlord who hires a lawyer, Prabha and Anu help her return to her family’s remote village. Anu arranges to meet her boyfriend for a clandestine affair, but the tranquility of this bleak little seaside haven gives Prabha space to reflect on the direction of her life, especially when the body of an unidentified man washes up on the shore.
This hallucinatory third act proves Kapadia a rising talent and a worthy ambassador for an India that hasn’t had a film in the competition for three decades. It starts out as a kind of hybrid documentary, but Everything we imagine is light Gradually, they transcend the limitations of reality and begin to question the nature of life itself. By temporarily taking Prabha and Anu out of Mumbai, Kapadia removes the overwhelming sensory assault of city life that inhibits contemplation. (“Have you ever thought about the future?” Prabha asks. “It feels like the future is just around the corner, and I’m not prepared for it,” Anu replies.)
Mystical yet somehow magical, the roundabout title captures Kapadia’s point without being too obvious, and at a time when economic inequality is rampant around the world and there’s so much focus on the lives of the have-nots and the have-nots, it’s refreshing to see the spotlight shone on ordinary women who live somewhere in between. Just right For the city.
