There is something of The Waste Land in the opening chorus of disembodied voices. One is also reminded of Wings of Desire as, while the camera sweeps through packed trains, we hear whispered worries and murmured secrets. All We Imagine as Light is, like that Wim Wenders title, one of the great city films – drawing both joy and alienation from the unforgiving metropolis – but it gains a different flavour altogether as, in a lyrical close, it moves out towards the wider territories.
[ Mumbai’s orchestrated chaos is the essence of its beauty Opens in new window ] Two of the three key characters, both nurses, live in a cramped apartment with an excellent pregnant cat. Prabha (Kani Kusruti), just about the protagonist, is facing up to the fact that her husband, working in Germany for some years, may not be returning home when he sends her, of all things, a posh rice cooker. The lack of a note looks to confirm the gift as a guilty brush-off.
While she has been processing the absence, Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), a shy doctor, has been doing his miserable best to woo her. One night he passes her a poem he has been writing for a competition. Anu (Divya Prabha), her flatmate, has been carrying on a secret affair with a Muslim man (Hridhu Haroon).
She keeps this a secret from her conservative family and from the sometimes judgmental Prabha. There is a sense the latter has lived within herself so long that she has shut herself off to empathy. We detect a kinder person just itching to.
