"There is always a feeling that I have to leave." -- an off-screen remark on the cloud of impermanence faced by an Indian immigrant to Mumbai, the Indian metropolis
"Desire, love, religion, class, gender, and social structures--all come under director Payal Kapadia's close and sensitive gaze. The ensemble's tender and unadorned performance also deserves special mention"--Special Mention by the Jury of the Denver International Film Festival, 2024
Very few Indian films have been able to pack in considerable realistic socio-political details and cinematic styles as Ms Payal Kapadia accomplished in All We Imagine as Light, comparable to similar contemporary cinematic works made elsewhere. Further, her modest film is bereft of high-cost special effects or an alluring star-cast value associated with commercial cinema. While it appears simple and ordinary documentation of real life, it merely blankets the well-structured conceptualization that made it a remarkable work, providing a fresh, wholesome treat for a perceptive viewer.
The Realistic Details
Few film viewers and critics distinguish the difference in value between films perceived as great works that were essentially the adaptation of existing creative materials (novels, plays, short stories, etc.) or true historical incidents when compared to films built on an original screenplay conceived and written by the director of the film. All We Imagine as Light belongs to the latter group. When Ms Kapadia chose to make a film on the lower-middle class population in a city, which is also a home to some of the world's richest billionaires, her choice to build her film around two nurses, among all possible professions she could have chosen to build her tale of compassion and camaraderie was most appropriate. Care-givers are often invisible wall-flower cinematic characters, while doctors are more likely to be hogging the spotlight. Kapadia's Florence Nightingales are strengthened mentally to deal squeamish situations. The main character in the film deals with a dementia patient who imagines conversations she had with her husband in the past. That very sequence prepares the viewer to link it to the somewhat similar sequence much later on in the film.
Kapadia's choice of nurses as principal characters become strategic in the development of her film. A nurse becomes empathetic towards a worried cook she interacts with at her workplace and discovers her problems--fleshing out her screenplay as it unfolds. Kapadia's choice of Malayalee nurses is again commendable as these professionals from the state of Kerala have spread their wings far and wide to distant lands gaining appreciation and goodwill. Not many will note that Kapadia is not a Malayalee from Kerala making a film that is predominantly in Malayalam language.
Kapadia's film, which is considerably Mumbai-centric, is different from the two Kolkata-centric Indian trilogies, made in the Seventies, by the acclaimed Indian directors Satyajit Ray (Pratidwandi; Seemabaddha; and Jano Aranya) and Mrinal Sen (Interview; Calcutta '71 and Padatik) because all those six films were adaptations of well-known written works in Bengali language. The closest comparable work to Kapadia's film would be Satyajit Ray's Mahanagar, which won the director a Silver Bear award at the Berlin Film festival in 1963; but that film too was an adaptation of a literary work of Narendranath Mitra. In comparison, Kapadia's work is truly original.
The world of Mumbai and the ever present camaraderie and goodwill of its immigrant Indian population with all the folks they rub shoulders with over time is infused into the screenplay. Indians are often inquisitive when they encounter someone they know who appears to be under stress or heading for trouble, bypassing their social pecking order, unlike their Occidental counterparts who insist on respecting privacy of others.
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| Prabha (Kani Kasruti, left) receives a surprise gift from her husband working in Germany, while her roommate Anu (right) inspects details of the gift |
Prabha (Kani Kasruti), a married senior nurse, craves for her husband's physical and emotional presence after he left for Germany seeking greener pastures soon after her hurried marriage, arranged by her parents. Surprisingly, Prabha's husband, who sparingly communicates with her after his departure, sends her a surprise gift--an electric rice cooker. Prabha's longing for her husband is visually communicated by a brief sequence of Prabha, hugging her unused gift, when she is alone in her room, which she shares with her younger colleague Anu. Anu (Divya Prabha), another Hindu nurse, in contrast is unmarried and is having a surreptitious affair with a Muslim man, which is likely to be frowned upon by their respective families and friends in contemporary India with its increasing Hindutva intolerance and the fear of "love Jihad," realistic trends rarely touched in frothy commercial Indian cinema. Parvati (Chhaya Kadam), the hospital cook, is widowed and possibly childless, and is forced out her 2-decade-old dwelling by uncaring land developers because her dead husband either never had or never chose to share with her any document of ownership or tenancy. Kapadia's social commentary on the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor is underscored when two principal women characters in the film pelt stones in the night at a land-developer's hoarding to attract real estate buyers of a new housing project built on acquired land that once belonged to the poor. The hoarding has the ironic and magnetic words: "Class is a Privilege. Reserved for the Privileged." Even flooding of parts of Mumbai leading to stoppage of local trains are cleverly weaved into the script. Casual viewers are likely to miss out on the critical socio-political commentary that dot the film, if they were merely concentrating on the story.
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| Anu (Divya Prabha) is lost in happy dreams while having a respite from dealing with patients at her hospital counter, where she soon gives helpful advice to a lady patient on birth control |
Similarly, Kapadia developed Prabha and Anu to be different, yet complementary and seemingly inverse of the other. Prabha is marrie d, mature, true to her spouse and rejecting the overtures of a qualified doctor also from Kerala but accepting her destiny of being married and living alone. Anu is young, adventurous, and rebellious enough to test the social and religious prejudices of the day. Parvati's character seems have a limited role of merely presenting the unpredictability of Mumbai for the less educated immigrants.
Much of Kapadia's script reflects the real India and is obliquely in consonance with the Indian Opposition parties' views on economic conditions of the poor in India. Even the man rescued from drowning states that he was toiling in a job where he could not differentiate between night and day. That comment from the rescued man leads us to the styles employed in the film.
Styles Adopted in Kapadia's Film
Light is a key element not just in the title of the film All We Imagine as Light but equally important in the structure of the screenplay. The man rescued from drowning in the sea speaks of having toiled somewhere where he could not distinguish night from day.
Very rarely does one see daylight in the Mumbai sequences. When it is day, the characters are indoors with electric lights brightening up their working space. When they are home after work, their small room is lit up by electric lights.
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| Sequences outside Mumbai is swathed in sunlight. Here Anu is lost in her dreamworld of her future with her lover. |
Daylight is reserved for the mid-segment of the film, when Prabha and Anu accompany Parvati to her rural home near the sea-shore after Parvati loses her right to stay on in her dwelling in Mumbai. Even when Prabha enters Parvati's modest house with reduced daylight, Prabha instinctively tries to switch on an electric light switch noticing it but realizes that there is no electricity. Otherwise there is sunlight throughout Prabha's and Anu's stay in Parvati's sea-side village, except when Prabha and Anu await their bus to board for their return to Mumbai, with bright-colored lights decorating the pre-dawn open-air shanty restaurant.
Cineastes familiar with contemporary world cinema will recall Carlos Reygadas' film Silent Light (2007) and its unforgettable opening and closing sequences. In that film, the opening sequence begins with insects chirping in the night until dawn breaks and reverses the gradual changes light and sound for its end-sequence. That film too, is all about light and darkness, metaphorically used to tell a tale. That film also won awards at Cannes and Chicago film festivals, the very same festivals that first honored Kapadia's film, 17 years apart. In both films, the respective directors wrote their original screenplays. Darkness and light can indeed be used as parentheses in the ever-evolving cinematic grammar to separate key sections for cine-literate audiences, beyond the limits of the common Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde scenario.
In this film All We Imagine as Light, light could well refer to the aspirations and dreams of immigrant Indians in Mumbai.
Kapadia treads into the world of magic realism as Prabha interacts with a person she had resuscitated after being rescued from drowning in the sea, in a manner used effectively by Italian director Ermanno Olmi in The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1988) in a magical sequence in a bar where the protagonist assumes an elderly couple sitting across his table are his dead parents communicating with him.
Kapadia might have upset the current Government in power with her films and implicit commentary. With her mother the talented painter Nalini Malani's genes in her blood, she is already stealing a march over the best of Indian film directors over several decades.
All We Imagine as Light is not just a film that has won the Grand Prix at Cannes and the Silver Hugo at Chicago in the annals of Indian cinema or the first Golden Globe nomination for an Indian director. It is a film that transcends Bollywood that makes films in Hindi, and regional cinema that limits language to small geographical areas of the Indian map. The film has gone beyond the late Bengali director Karlovy Vary film festival winning Mrinal Sen's film Oka Oorie Katha (1977) in Telugu language, adapting Munshi Premchand's Hindi literary work Kafan, with actors from Karnataka state. Payal Kapadia's effort will go a long way in introducing the concept of an Indian film that unifies India with a mix of Indian languages and cultures.
P.S. This critic values his brief encounter as a journalist in the early-Eighties with Payal Kapadia's mother Nalini Malani at the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, on one of her paintings on exhibit. All We Imagine as Light is now on this critic's list of best Indian films and one of best cinematic works of 2024.
