A woman leans on a pole in her compartment, for support, for balance, swaying with the rhythm of the train. She looks exhausted, after a long day at work. We take in, like she does, the way the city looks at night, bars of refracted light and darkness dancing across her face. This image, which comes early in Payal Kapadia’s lyrical ode to working-class Mumbai and female friendship, becomes a marker of the themes the film explores, and it stays with you.
I watched the film at its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where it won the Grand Prix award, wowing some of the world’s most hard-nosed critics. Those of us who had seen her earlier work, especially the striking documentary ‘A Night Of Knowing Nothing’, based on the student agitation at the director’s alma mater, the FTII (Film and Television Institute of India), knew that her debut feature would be far removed from the Indian exotica that appeals, still, to so much of the West. In many ways, I found several similarities between the documentary and the feature, which builds on the promise that Kapadia has shown, making her one of the most original filmmakers working today.
Kapadia uses her deceptively gentle observational style punctuated by sharply delivered home truths, which she used to such good effect in ‘A Night Of Knowing Nothing’, to tell her story, about two Malayali nurses, Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), and their Maharashtrian co-worker Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), the trio forming the kind of friends-like-family bonds which often feel stronger than blood ties, especially when we live away from home and kin.
A hospital can become a site where intimacy builds with bewildering speed, as covers are withdrawn, leaving humans naked both physically and figuratively. There’s an unmasked quality to the conversations between the older Prabha, having experienced the city in ways that the younger Anu hasn’t. But Prabha, struggling with the loneliness resulting from a marriage with an absentee husband away in Germany, feels much more inexperienced in the matters of the heart compared to the open-to-the-moment, flirtatious Anu, whose relationship with the Muslim Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon) makes her the butt of gossip amongst the other nurses. Parvaty’s imminent eviction from the building she has lived in for over twenty years becomes a turning point in the lives of these women, as does the arrival of a mysterious rice cooker which comes bearing foreign stamps and smells.
Kapadia’s film is intensely personal. A scene in which Prabha comes upon the cooker, stashed under a cupboard, and clasps it within her knees, is shockingly, unexpectedly sensual: later in the film, which moves to the Ratnagiri coast, with its beautiful azure coastline sparkling in the clean ocean air, so different from the distinctive tarpaulin-blue of the Mumbai skyline, the characters shed their calcified city skin, and discover the lost parts of themselves.
EYE | Payal Kapadia: Cannes win helped with the distribution of All We Imagine As Light in India
It is also intensely political. If you don’t have papers (‘kaagaz’ in India now comes with loaded connotations), you cannot prove that you are a bonafide resident of a city you have helped build. Parvaty’s husband was a mill-worker, a space which has been gobbled up by rapacious builders: will she ever be able to go back to that place, because the village is lovely, but if there had been livelihood choices there, would anyone want to move away? Anu and Shiaz’s relationship coming in for censure from the former’s closest compatriots speaks to today’s polarised India: will it ever go back to the older, less oppressive ways?
I did feel a certain flattening in some parts where the poetic becomes suppressed by the quotidian, but those are far and few in between. Beautifully shot by Kapadia’s constant cinematographer Ranabir Das, the film is suffused with light, lambent in some places, shard-like in others. And a character that’s one of the most affecting I have encountered in the movies: the wonderful Kani Kusruti turns yearning into a full-time job, and just for her, this film (released today in India) is worth every minute of your time, imagined or otherwise.
All We Imagine As Light movie cast: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon, Azees Nedumangad
All We Imagine As Light movie review: Payal Kapadia
All We Imagine As Light movie review: 3.5 stars
