Bombay dreams: "All We Imagine as Light"

One reason critics have responded to All We Imagine as Light as they have is surely that it does something relatively new with one of the most filmed cities in the world. Shaping an idea of Mumbai as a lived-in, workaday environment rather than a mere backdrop for all-singing, all-dancing spectacle, writer-director Payal Kapadia seeks out sidestreets and backlanes in place of studio lots; once in situ, she's gone searching for everyday interactions, and sought to centralise ordinary people instead of the usual Bollywood heroes. Many of these are migrants, drawn hereabouts by the prospect of paid labour; some of them have even made it to the commuter class, sketched in an early sequence that finds women nodding off on the evening metro train. Kapadia's heroines are both: a pair of Malayali nurses observed sharing a flat, while at different stages in their professional and personal lives. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is the more senior of the two, with fledgling sisters to train and a husband who's gone to work overseas and all but disappeared without trace. Anu (Divya Prabha) is the junior party, a keen texter, still learning the ropes, and involved in a giggly romance with a male contemporary. Although the women's day jobs have a life-and-death element, these two aren't trying to save the world so much as keep a roof over their heads, and maybe find happiness or at the very least some peace. Part of the novelty with All We Imagine as Light lies in seeing a contemporary Indian film where the heroines appear far more likely to gaze up at billboards than be enshrined upon them; you can well imagine Prabha and Anu encountering Deepika or Ananya's latest spot of cross-promotional branding and wondering how the hell anybody reaches such dizzy heights.

Given the extent of the praise lavished on Kapadia's film since its Cannes outing this summer - where it won glowing reviews and, at the last, the Grand Prix gong - you may arrive at AWIAL expecting it to knock you for six. Is it any less of an achievement that it instead quietly diverts, absorbs and involves us? This is partly an issue with festival discourse, where everything has to be talked up as if the very future of the cinema depends on it, but talking AWIAL up strikes me as less than helpful - perhaps even actively unhelpful - to the film's understated methods. There is, for starters, a subtle complexity to the way these women interact with one another, with the men in their lives, and especially with Mumbai itself, regarded here as a very masculine conception, alternating between plugged-in, switched-on attraction and cool indifference. (The girls have to get away from it at a crucial juncture to appreciate the lives they've made for themselves.) I'd venture Kapadia isn't doing vastly more than a lot of the Parallel and independent cinema that never travelled to Europe and thus never had a major festival spotlight shone upon it: she calmly, attentively observes, looking out for her characters in all senses of the term. Yet one appreciable difference is that AWIAL has been written and directed by a woman who - more so than Satyajit Ray, say - knows innately how women talk, act and interrelate at the end of a long and tiring working day. Another would be that this Indian-French co-production has been carefully curated to court Western eyes and tastes. If those critical first responders fell in love, it's in part because the movie was always intended as a mash note or meet-cute.

Inarguably, much of the detail here is Mumbai local and specific: the dishes the women prepare, the dialects spoken, the awkward couplings and ladies-only carriages, the cavernous rich/poor divide. What Kapadia has done is pull all this into the 21st century, to make an observational film that is as much Modi as Ray, born of what has been (for better and worse) a rapid social modernisation, and what we might call the Mubification of India, given the number of shots and sequences here that clearly relate to the texts its maker has studied and metabolised. Michael Mann-like tableaux of Mumbai by night crystallise one of the film's idiosyncrasies: a light blue palette that conveys coolness over the more familiar heat and humidity. (The rains fall on these girls.) The basic set-up even has something of certain American cable shows in its DNA: women adrift in a city that reminds them, time and again, of their own insignificance. You wouldn't have to be a Mumbai resident to know what that feels like. You don't necessarily have to be a woman to know what that feels like. At one point, you catch Kapadia actively pandering, when she films the nurses huddling in a cinema, illuminated by the screen: see, she whispers, they're really just like you. Yet AWIAL is at its most insinuating whenever it channels ambience and transience: travelling shots of migrant workers unloading their goods, the trains rattling along, a second-half outing to the coast, where the film begins to seem like a holiday special of its own, with caves that echo In the Mood for Love's Angkor Wat finale. We're all just passing through, in the end, sometimes borne on the waves, often treading water. Announcing herself as an ultra-empathetic eye and voice, Kapadia at least tries to preserve some record of these women, and she invites us similarly to consider their struggles and travails; quietly, in her film's singularly hushed fashion, the we of the title becomes properly universal and all-encompassing. Folks we recognise, yearning for better and for more, whether greater stability or permanency: sometimes the cinema can be as simple, and yet as rare and precious, a thing as this.

All We Imagine as Light is now playing in selected cinemas.