Payal Kapadia (2024)
From the start, writer-director Payal Kapadia’s description of Mumbai, where she was born, raised and educated, is different from – to cite the obvious example – outsider Danny Boyle’s splashy portrait of the place in Slumdog Millionaire (2008). In the prologue to All We Imagine as Light, the camera moves swiftly through a frenetic street market and onto packed commuter trains; on the soundtrack, the voices of newcomers to Mumbai explain why they came to the city or their first impressions of it. A docker says he found the foul smell of the waterfront overpowering, a woman that the busy streets helped her subdue her sadness. Kapadia observes in a quasi-documentary style, conveying grimy heat and local colour without overstressing the one or romanticising the other. She focuses on a succession of faces before settling on a fortyish woman on a train. This is Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a hospital nurse, who will be the film’s central character and consciousness.
Anu (Divya Prabha), the younger work colleague who shares Prabha’s tiny rented flat, will also be crucial to the story. These two nurses are both Hindu and originally from Kerala but otherwise clearly distinguished. They’re of different generations. Prabha, in an arranged marriage, hasn’t seen her husband in years. He left to work in Germany soon after they wed but Prabha is almost primly bound by her married state. She won’t even go to the cinema with other nurses planning to drool at a Bollywood actor. She keeps her emotional distance from Dr Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), her awkward, sensitive admirer at the hospital. Anu is readier to enjoy life and consequently low on funds; at the start, Prabha agrees to pay her colleague’s monthly rent again though she warns this’ll be the last time that she does. Anu’s parents are pushing her to make an arranged marriage but, unbeknown to them, she’s seeing a young Muslim man, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon). (Prabha is aware of a boyfriend but not that he’s Muslim.) There’s a third important female character. Widowed Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a cook at the hospital where Prabha and Anu work, has been evicted from her home in a tenement block. The building is about to be demolished to make way for luxury apartments (‘Class is a privilege: reserved for the privileged’, the developer’s banner on the site proclaims). Parvaty has no documents to prove that she and her late husband owned what had been their home for twenty-odd years.
The structure of those opening sequences isn’t so unusual for a screen drama set in a big city. It hints at the huge number of different lives that Kapadia could explore until she chooses just one of Mumbai’s more than twenty-one million citizens. And while it’s a cliché to label the setting of a film a character in itself, that’s apt enough in this case – for positive and less positive reasons. While Kapadia and Ranabir Das, her cinematographer, certainly animate the city – the buildings, the social life, the weather (it’s monsoon season) – the principals’ interactions, with each other and with other people, are well observed but unexciting. A rice cooker arrives in the post for Prabha, from Germany. Shiaz will be home alone when his parents go to a wedding and tells Anu to get hold of a burka to wear in his neighbourhood on the way to the house. She’s kitted out and on her way when he texts apologetically to call off the tryst: the wedding has been postponed due to the bad weather. Prabha and Anu ask Manoj to give their pregnant cat an ultrasound to confirm the number of kittens she’s expecting: Manoj is so shy in their presence he’s reluctant even to lay his hand on the cat’s belly. Parvaty persuades well-behaved Prabha to join her in throwing stones at the new building development.
An elderly hospital patient (Madhu Raja), refusing to take the medication that she tells Prabha is causing nightly visitations from her dead husband, makes a strong impression but isn’t seen again. When a younger wife and mother (Shweta Prajaparti) explains her husband won’t have a vasectomy, Anu, without being asked, hands the woman contraceptives. The hospital sequences soon peter out, though. About halfway through, when Kapadia inserts another city montage including further brief voiceovers, I wondered if we were in for just another hour of modest storytelling and, after that, a third, concluding montage. Instead, Kapadia starts to surprise. She cuts to a bus journey, as Prabha and Anu help Parvaty move back to the coastal village, near the port city of Ratnagiri, that she hails from. You expect the pair’s overnight stay in the village to form an interlude before normal Mumbai service is resumed. In fact, the film – or, at any rate, the camera – never returns to the city. As All We Imagine as Light changes location, the narrative changes gear, becomes more compelling.
Anu and Shiaz have decided to rearrange their rendezvous; he’s done a recce of the area that lies behind the seashore and the village. Anu and he first get together in woodland, where Prabha catches sight of them, and later in a cave, where they have sex. While this is going on, a commotion on the beach attracts Prabha’s attention. The body of a man has been dragged from the sea: the crowd that gathers round thinks he’s dead; Prabha gives him the kiss of life and he revives. The man (Anand Sami) is taken somewhere nearby to rest; as he sleeps, nurse Prabha tends the cuts on his upper body. A local woman comes in with food for the man and assumes Prabha is his wife. Prabha immediately says she’s not but, after the other woman has left and the man has seemingly come to, she has a conversation with him as if he were her husband. He explains his exhausting life in a German factory – working such long hours, in a place so dark, that he has to imagine the light in the world outside.
Both these episodes are very well done. Human figures have been sculpted into the caves: Anu is magnetised by the expression of a woman who, she says, looks to have been stuck there for ages, waiting for something to happen. There are graffiti in different languages on the cave walls – the work of other, perhaps forbidden lovers. When Anu says that Shiaz himself has written one of the Malayalam inscriptions, he doesn’t deny it. (Like Prabha and Anu, he’s Keralan; most of the film is in Malayalam although Hindi and Marathi feature, too.) Kapadia films the lovemaking quite discreetly yet the sequence, not least because it’s the only such sequence in the film, is sensually expressive. Prabha’s dialogue with the man she resuscitates is no less remarkable. You don’t for a minute think this man really could be her long-lost husband yet the exchange between them makes sense. After all, Prabha has brought a man back to a life and someone else has assumed he is her husband: now’s the time to imagine what she would like to say to her husband and what he might say to her.
Kani Kusruti’s strongly interior acting and Divya Prabha’s effortless changes of mood are highly complementary and effective: their performance rhythms beautifully capture the temperamental gulf between Prabha, who is solemn, resigned yet tense, and impatient Anu. Chhaya Kadam is a potent naturalistic performer, too. Hridhu Haroon’s Shiaz is eager yet uncertain, a winning combination. Just about everything in the young-love relationship works well. One of the funniest bits comes when Anu shows Shiaz on her phone photos of the prospective Hindu husbands her parents have sent her, and he launches into sarcastic quick-fire impersonations of the types these men appear to be. I was sometimes irritated by the piano on the soundtrack (excerpts from ‘The Homeless Wanderer’ by the Ethiopian composer and nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam, who died in 2023 in her hundredth year) but there’s no doubting Payal Kapadia has chosen her music with care: the very different, discordant sounds of the Kolkata musician Topshe are also in evidence.
The film ends on the beach, as night falls on the village. Prabha asks the teenager (Saee Abhay Limaye) who runs a café-shack if she’s closing up. The answer’s no, so Prabha, Parvaty and Anu take a table. Prabha, more relaxed now, tells Anu she has seen her with her young man. She suggests that Shiaz join them on the beach and he does. The four sit comfortably together under the lights of the shack. Ratnagiri hasn’t eclipsed Mumbai, not least because we know that, when Prabha and Anu return home, they’ll still face the same difficulties they faced twenty-four hours ago. In other words, nothing is resolved in All We Imagine as Light. Yet, for both women, something has been achieved.
29 November 2024
