This article is part of Film Comment’s Best of 2024 coverage. Read all the lists here.

All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)

I was knocked out by Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, a swooningly gorgeous film whose bloody heart and loose piriformis muscle is Daniel Craig’s performance as Bill Lee—a character who is as like and unlike William S. Burroughs as was the Bill Lee of the novel from which the movie is adapted. I read somewhere that people went to the National Theatre’s 1993 production of Angels in America because Craig, who played Joe Pitt, was such a great kisser. That talent might also be a lure for this movie, but in the scene that seems to me one of the most transcendent in film history, he is completely alone on the screen. 

Roughly four minutes long, the scene takes place in real time—i.e., without edits. It opens with an image of a table on which lies a copy of Appointment in Samarra, an ashtray, a lighter, a spoon, and a syringe. All we see of Bill is the midsection of his chest—from the third to the fifth button of his shirt—and then his forearms as he slowly begins to prepare his fix. He positions the needle in the crook of his elbow, and the camera follows the movement of his arm upward, so that we now see his face; the table has disappeared. The camera begins to push in toward him (not yet a close-up, indeed never a tight close-up). New Order’s “Leave Me Alone” plays on the soundtrack, and Bill, using the same arm with which he shot up, lifts a cigarette to his lips, blows out the smoke, puts down the cigarette, picks up a bottle of beer, drinks from it, puts down the bottle, picks up the cigarette—this alternation continues, again and again, as something beyond contentment slowly suffuses his face. What we see is the obliteration of the agony of anxiety that has propelled the first half of the film. Bill has been in the grip of a mad love, both ignited and frustrated by a youthful and inscrutable object of desire whose primary asset is that he plays a good game of slap/kiss. The sublime fix will wear off, but the film has changed direction, and it needed a performance as revealing of the flesh and its underside as Craig’s to achieve it.

It may or may not be a coincidence that Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, a film that in almost every way is dissimilar to Queer, also has at its turning point a scene that is composed in real time. Here, one of the central characters—a nurse from Kerala (Kani Kusruti), working  Mumbai, who longs to have a man in her life but is married to someone she barely knew before he abandoned her—sits next to a doctor just outside the hospital where they work. He tells her that he is going to leave the city for his hometown—but he might not, if only she could perhaps be with him. He doesn’t say anything quite as obvious, but she understands, and answers that he knows she is married. The camera doesn’t move, and the few words that are spoken are surrounded by silence (and this in a film where the soundtrack is as dense as the images are often crowded). Love does not find a way, but Kapadia, like Guadagnino, gives us the gift of an actor who takes us to a place many of us have been to and survived, if only to find a sublime recognition of impossible desire in movies.     

Amy Taubin lives in New York City, where she writes about movies and art.