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‘All We Imagine as Light’ Review: A Glowing Portrait of Urban Connection and Unexpected Sisterhood
Two Mumbai nurses bond unexpectedly in Indian director Payal Kapadia's lovely sophomore feature, "All We Imagine as Light."
There is a stiffness within her that softens when she is caring for others and trying to solve their problems, be it an elderly patient beset by hallucinations of her dead husband, or her best friend Parvati (Chhaya Kadam) a widow who is being cruelly forced out of her home by ruthless property developers. It’s a portrait of the city so unusually rich and lived in, that it’s almost a wrench to leave it when, in the film’s second half, Prabha and Anu make the journey to the village by the sea where Parvati, finally fed up with the constant harassment of the Mumbai developers, is moving back into her childhood home. But the location change soon makes sense within the film’s larger theme of displacement – both Anu and Prabha originally hail from Kerala and this brief moment of respite from the numbing bustle of massive Mumbai allows us to focus more directly on the bonds of mutual support that have sprung up between the women, and to see how their fragile-seeming connection has proven to have unexpected tensile strength.
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