Sometime in late November, you can feel Mumbai entering winter. Many can point to the exact day, the exact moment. It could be midnight at home when the skin suddenly prickles in the cool wind. It might be the night-time desire to actually cover yourself with a sheet. It might be the feeling of waking up in the morning without a thin film of slight sweat on your skin. It might be the first day you do not use the spare shirt you carry in your bag because today the congested local did not sweat you out. Suddenly, there is something gentle about living in a brutal city.
Director Payal Kapadia understands that. She also understands that this gentleness is often expressed as romance, and the romance as evading the harshness of the city. There is a way that yearning erases the brokenness of the thing yearned for, the way nostalgia erases politics. What she has done with All We Imagine as Light, then, is to find a way to gently express the harshness of the city. To watch it is to see brutality exist, not as a contrast to gentleness, but as the two living uncomfortably alongside each other. A character floating above her film, like a member from a Greek chorus tells her, tells us that we think of the city as mayanagari, the city of illusions, only because that is the only way we can endure it—that otherwise, we would go mad. What are the lies we tell to endure the truth? As though Kapadia has opened up a new language, romantic and abrasive, her Cannes Grand Prix-winning film works as both myth and fact. The image is her vocabulary. The question, then, is: Can criticism match up to it?
Much to engage with
On each viewing, the film seems to rip open a new way of engaging with it. (Spoilers ahead, so tread lightly.) The film has a strange way of growing. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) are two Malayali nurses working in a hospital in South Mumbai. While Prabha’s husband is away in Germany and she has had no contact with him for a long time, Anu is pursuing a clandestine relationship with a Muslim man, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon). Anu is younger and her sense of fear is displaced to the future, while Prabha, always holding her handkerchief tightly in her palm, inhabits fear as an ever-present patina—that is what it means to be conservative, to toe the line that culture draws. But this character bleeds that neatness; it becomes difficult to call her conservative because you see the ravages of this conservativeness on her as wounds.
Also Read | ‘All We Imagine as Light’ by Payal Kapadia scripts history with groundbreaking Grand Prix win at Cannes 2024
Anu’s youth is not forceful. When we first meet her, she is taking information from a patient. She makes a “che” click of annoyance when the patient makes a mistake while giving her age. The patient does not want to get pregnant again—an intimate detail flung from the opposite side of a plexiglass barrier. Anu offers pills. When asked how much the pills cost, Anu makes the same sound she made when she was annoyed, but this time it is an allowance. I recognise this sound—we were told, as kids, to never make it.
Parvati (Chhaya Kadam), the widow of a mill worker, is the peon at that hospital. She is being evicted from her home because she has no papers to prove it belongs to her. She lives in Lower Parel; the two nurses live as roommates in Dahisar. (The film alludes to the long distance from the two nurses’ workplace, and Payal Kapadia confirmed the location in a walk she did with Karwaan Heritage Collective.) The first hour of the film is in tight spaces of wet Mumbai—a soft wetness. When the rains recede with Ganesh Chaturthi, in a narrative and visual swerve, the three of them then journey to the red soils and wide open spaces of Ratnagiri. For the first time in the film, it is here that we see the sea, the women entering it. As though asking, what is the point of the sea if you cannot sit by it, sit inside it (a possibility Mumbai’s clogged sea does not afford)?
Weaving in dreams into the fabric of reality
In Ratnagiri, a stranger washes up on the shore, and in one of the most fragile scenes of the film, Prabha imagines him as her husband. It is this scene that left many cold and confused, given the film’s otherwise coiled alignment with realism as her language of feeling. But if Kapadia has a penchant for anything, it is discomfort with the edges of a genre. With her debut feature film, A Night of Knowing Nothing, for example, a documentary of the growing protest movements, she infused the perfume of longing, with fictional letters about loving on either side of the caste barrier being read as a dreamy, even if forceful and overwrought, voice-over. She called it a “hybrid documentary”.
With All We Imagine as Light—named after the ink and enamel painting on acrylic by Nalini Malani, Kapadia’s mother—you see the shadows of the camera in the very first scene. Later, you see the reflection of the camera in an Innova trailing along the characters walking on the narrow footpaths of a Mumbai market. She wants you to feel where fiction begins, lodged somewhere in the process of making it, the process itself being non-fiction. And with this knot not being enough, she turns to dreams.
“She wants you to feel where fiction begins, lodged somewhere in the process of making it, the process itself being non-fiction. And with this not being enough, she turns to dreams.”
In some sense, the film floats on the solid ground of the imagined. You never know how Shiaz and Anu met and fell in love. Instead, you know how they could have met if Anu had chosen to become an air hostess. You do not know how Prabha’s husband lives in Germany. You know how Prabha imagines him, lonely and dwarfed in empty factories. The dreams sometimes have this lifelike quality that they state, instead, as life itself. Despite being littered with “issues” that can render the film a political thriller—eviction, “love jehad” —the treatment is more evasive. A bulldozer makes an appearance, and you do not know where, you do not know for what—road construction? Home eviction? Eviction of whom—the Muslims? The widow? The possibilities simmer without ever being stated.
Then, there is the imagined masculinity. All the men in this film are kind, yielding, yearning: the doctor who wants to court Prabha, Shiaz who looks at Anu when the rain disrupts their lovemaking, as though asking her permission to stop and find a drier place, the boy in the beachside shack listening to rap, telling the women to sit as long as they want to.
How it all comes together
It was on a later viewing that the film, with its flung-out experiments, actually clicked into place as a coherent thing—though coherence is its own enemy, especially with Kapadia’s penchant for everything-ness. If you read the arc of the film as Prabha coming to terms with Anu’s desire, the film feels neater. Prabha calls Anu a “slut” after hearing gossip about her affair. She apologises for it, but the feeling remains that a woman must behave the way women ought to behave. That Prabha needed that dream of her husband to actually feel desire, feel what Anu feels—because there is no way that Prabha will get to feel desire, otherwise—so that, in the very next scene, she accepts Shiaz and Anu’s togetherness is a gentle nod to her transformation, although it is so gentle, it feels like a nudge. She does not say that she accepts them; she, instead, asks him about his hometown. The camera lingers on her hand on the chair nearby, inviting Anu to sit next to her. This is what I mean by the film’s gentleness. And that it is being read forcefully, and by being read forcefully, being misread.
Divya Prabha in All We Imagine As Light.
| Photo Credit:
Janus and Sideshow Films via AP
On the one hand, by the Film Federation of India (FFI), which is India’s Oscar Committee, which decided against nominating the film. FFI president Ravi Kottarakara commented: “The jury said they were watching a European film taking place in India, not an Indian film taking place in India.” This comment created debate, with people coming to the film’s defence, making a case for its Indian-ness. This is a shallow, reactionary posture. What does it even mean to be an Indian film? Is it that the film is set in India? Unfolding in an Indian language? Shot and conceived by Indians? Made with Indian money? Or is there such a thing as an Indian aesthetic, an Indian narrative? The desire to claim something as firmly Indian can just as easily become a parochial desire.
Kapadia has made no bones about the influences that ground her artistry—Pedro Costa, Naomi Kawase, Miguel Gomes, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. She has an enviable grasp of Indian cinema, and her list of “Bombay Films” is a great example of this. But her filmmaking language is unfamiliar to most Indians; it draws deeply from the wells of the above names. So what?
Stepping outside to see clearly inside
The gloss of All We Imagine As Light is unlike anything we have seen in Indian cinema. Kapadia has noted in interviews the ever-present tube light that flashes flat white light on our faces, in our homes. She and her cinematographer Ranabir Das had to think of ways of making this light—what Kapadia calls “pachaak”—soft. The light falling on the skin of the actors is like chalk rubbed on their skin. It renders realism impressionistic. The gold jewellery that the women wear—that most Malayali women wear—glistens even in the night. It catches the light and flares. The wet underbelly of the lip ripples. The steel bars in the trains, when hit by daylight, look like the light has eaten into them. Kapadia’s gaze renders the mundane extraordinary, a kind of a gaze that requires you to step out and look in with rigour. It is a kind of enforced outsider’s gaze, performed from within.
“The Film Federation of India committee thinks sending a film to the Oscars is like featuring a float at the Republic Day parade—it must “represent” India and Indian cinema, and not cinema itself.”
Another question that came up was if an Indian film would allow full frontal nudity, as Kapadia has used in this film, knowing fully well that such scenes will be captured and floated on the internet as porn? (It has happened with this film.) What we consider an “Indian film” is often one that caters to an Indian audience only, the limitations of that audience somehow finding expression in the limitations of that cinema. An Indian film is not an abstract category. The fact remains that the committee thinks sending a film to the Oscars is like featuring a float at the Republic Day parade—it must “represent” India and Indian cinema, and not cinema itself, and the demands of representation are, by definition, narrow and unforgiving.
Then, on the other hand, is the forceful reading of the film as a political project by critics. The Time profile of Kapadia, calling the film an “act of protest”, writes: “Each of the movie’s characters is a victim of broader social circumstances, but their kinship cuts through these divisions.” It is a strange sentence, one where you can see the binaries within which the film is being read—victim-victor, kinship-estrangement. Words like “agency”, “Islamophobia”, and the way they are strung together flatten the film’s texture.
It is not that these sentences, this phrasing, this flatness is invalid. But the film’s light-touch approach to its politics is not incidental. It is conscious, trying to ensure the film does not collapse under the weight of its politics as such films often do. It is not subtext that needs to be yanked to the foreground by the discerning critic but very much part of the text itself.
Out of the box thinking and viewing
The angular lethargy and opaque clarity of the writing of the review, of “catharsis” and “chosen families”, feels like it is reading against the film, not alongside it. “When something is not that well defined, it has a lot of possibility of being something wonderful,” Kapadia notes in a conversation at the New York Film Festival. She speaks of each film challenging the very form of cinema. Can we, then, not look at the same desire vis-a-vis criticism?
Also Read | We need a new language to speak of new despairs
It is impossible to emerge from such review pieces with any sense of her films as anything but powerful, filigreed pamphlets. Or, perhaps, that is what criticism does to cinema anyway? It broadens it by flattening it. It makes it clearer, by employing the trauma of reason. Can criticism and poetry go together? It is not about style and substance as separate, but how style can change the very contours of that substance.
There is an image of a tablecloth from Payal Kapadia’s award-winning film A Night Of Knowing Nothing that I keep coming back to. The monochrome frame has a corner that is bathed in charcoal. A soft breeze and suddenly the material catches the light, as though lit by a flame, announcing its existence. A poignant flutter that despite being in your eyeline is not visible until it is literally yanked into existence. It is the kind of image-making that descends softly on a film that takes revelation as not a dramatic moment, but a constant state. Filled with footage of violence and police brutality, of joy and heartbreak, it is this image that has retained its strength. It is an image that doesn’t say much. We can make it talk, force-feed meaning into it. Imagine depth when the image was going for breadth. There is something criticism can do by acting upon the text it critiques. There is also something the text can do by acting upon the criticism it elicits. What of that?
Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.
