All We Imagine As Light reimagines much we imagine as cinema
- counter couture
- Dec 6, 2024
- 7 min read
The first thought that came to my mind as the credits started rolling over the wonderfully cathartic final frame of Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light was, "I wonder how a non-Malayali would describe this film". Or to put it more accurately, I wondered how differently a non-Malayali must have experienced this film. Because All We Imagine As Light is very much a film about experiences -both familiar and alien; lived and unlived. It is also a film meant to be experienced; not watched, or "consumed".
Of course, every story is about an experience. All We Imagine As Light is about the immigrant experience. It's about the female experience, and the class experience. It's about three women, Prabha, Anu and Parvathy, and the men in their lives -some of whom are present and some whose presence is felt by their absence.
My favourite scene in All We Imagine As Light, for instance, is a single-frame meditation on how two -no, three- people can experience an object differently. The context is this: Prabha has not heard from her husband, who lives in Germany, for over a year. (They used to talk regularly, she tells Parvathy in a later scene, and then maybe he just ran out of things to talk about.) One evening, Prabha receives a package. No sender name, no return address. Prabha's room-mate Anu opens it to discover a state-of-the-art rice cooker. They had a cooker back home, Anu tells Prabha excitedly, but nothing nearly as modern as this one!
Upon further investigation, they conclude that the cooker is a gift from Prabha's husband. The expression on Prabha's face is likely to herd the viewer towards her immediate line of thinking: how can this man, her husband, break a year's radio silence with a kitchen device and no note? Some time later, Anu blissfully asleep, we see Prabha on the kitchen floor, unwaxed legs and arms wrapped around the rice cooker, pensive, tearful, angry... hopeful? As incongruent as it may seem to Anu's generation -who are used to "wife guys" and PDA on social media- is it really so hard, upon reflection, to imagine -or hope- that the gift was in fact an expression of love by her husband? I did not internalize Prabha on the kitchen floor as a woman in mourning; I saw a woman thrust deeper into confusion as to where her marriage was headed. Prabha on the Kitchen Floor, the painting, would fit neatly next to any Renaissance-era depiction of desire and longing.
When Anu jokes to her boyfriend that one of the nurses at her hospital was mortified when she discovered that the old man she was giving a sponge bath to had become aroused, he inquires hesitantly if she has had many such experiences. The question is as much about her professional life as it is about her personal past. Anu chooses a retort that is also based on experience, or the lack of it. "What is this," she laughs, "why are you talking like a virgin?" We never quite find out the answer to Anu's boyfriend's question, because it is -quite rightly- nobody's business but her own.
Similarly when Parvathy, the hospital cook, decides to leave Mumbai after being forced to vacate her home by the property developer, Prabha (who, as a nurse, is higher up in the class chain) does not gift her money or hand-me-downs. The two women choose instead to have dinner at a restaurant - one that Parvathy didn't have the courage to step into despite passing by it all those years.
But as much as All You Can Imagine As Light is a film about experiences, it is also a film about the act of experience. The praxis of experience. Take for instance, how most theatre-goers probably experienced this film. Chances are they paid an additional "convenience fee" to book tickets for this film online. Many of them took an Uber to the multiplex the film was being screened at. Quite a few of them -before the film started- balked internally at the refreshments counter charging 400 bucks for a 400ml of coke but handed over the money anyway, because how can the "cinema experience" be complete without cola and a bucket of popcorn?
Prabha, Anu and Parvathy don't Uber; they use the metro. So do people of all classes, in a city as sprawling as Mumbai. But most people like Prabha or Anu, who are immigrant Malayali nurses working and living together in a tiny 1BHK, wouldn't choose to watch a film like this (as established winkingly in a scene where they try to choose a film for Movie Night with their colleagues) for entertainment. They would (and do) go to a single-screen theatre, not a multiplex. They would prefer more action, or romance, or comedy -though All We Imagine As Light has all three, in loads; the difference is in the framing.
All We Imagine As Light is framed interestingly, not because the frames are often magical, which they are, but because it's framed as two different films. The first half is a documentarian's film, where the film maker is deceptively unobtrusive, lulling the viewer into a false confidence that we are not invading the privacy of three disparate individuals while very much sticking the camera into every crease and crevice of their souls.
The second half is The Hero's Journey. It is Prabha's film, it is an action film with something happening in every scene that pushes the story forward and all the film maker can do is follow. The viewer and camera are both put in their place, which is to sit back and absorb, experience, while the hero(ine) does heroic things. To watch, mutely, as she wipes clean the slate of her own experiences, to restart her life's journey.
All You Imagines As Light also frames itself differently for different audiences.
To say that people experience art differently is to overstate the obvious. It also leaves the act of experience to the person interacting with the art in question. All You Can Imagine As Light -intentionally or not- actively ensures that different people, or at least different subsets of people- experience the film differently.
Take for example, the character of Dr. Manoj, who is silently in love with Prabha in a city that has silenced him. The doctor is struggling with a problem common to many immigrant Malayalis: an utter inability to learn a foreign language -which in his case is Hindi- and therefore never quite feeling at home in the city he has immigrated to.
Now most people will be able to sympathize with Manoj's plight. A French person who watched All We Imagine As Light in Cannes is almost certain to have gotten lost in translation sometime in their life, just as most multiplex audiences in India are likely to have a colleague or friend struggling with the local language. But being French in America is not the same as a Delhiite not understanding Malayalam in Kerala. And they're both very, very different from being a Malayali of a certain socio-economic background who just cannot seem to grasp Hindi and is therefore unable to form meaningful relationships in Mumbai. A native Hindi or Marathi speaker outside the cinema hall may find Manjoj's plight laughable or perhaps even arrogant. It is a loneliness only a minority will fully understand.
The film has many such in-jokes and references for Malayalis to experience a little more intimately than everybody else. Anu and her boyfriend invoking the "Kanjirappally Achayan", a regional Malayali archetype, while commenting on a slideshow of her suitors in one hilarious sequence. All audiences will find the scene funny, but they will not all get the reference. The Kerala-style fish preparation Prabha labours over in her kitchen. The parotta-beef dinner that Anu and her boyfriend share in a typically Malayali-restaurant-in-Bombay (red plastic chair: check) Malayali restaurant. The most telling example of this duality is the title of the film itself. In Malayalam, the film is called "Prabhayayi Ninachathellam". Or Prabha Ayi Ninchathellam, meaning: all we imagined as light ("Prabha").
There are two things worth noting here. Firstly, the use of the word "prabha", which is also the name of the lead character in the film, to mean light. "Prabha" certainly is one Malayalam word for light, but it's not the most obvious. The words "velicham" or "prakasham" are all much more commonly used in spoken Malayalam to mean light, and would fit the title just as nicely. The choice of "Prabha" was intentional, so that the title could just as easily mean "All we imagined as Prabha". Because Prabha, quiet and almost unremarkable as she maybe in a crowd, is very much the light of the people in her life. She pays Anu's rent, she talks to Parvathy's lawyer on her behalf, she even holds the fate of love-struck Dr. Manoj in her hands. And the second (half of the) film, Prabha's film, shows us exactly who she perhaps could have been when she firmly pushes a crowd of people aside and takes charge of resuscitating a drowning man back to life. An incident that triggers a small chain of events that eventually sets her free (or so it seems) to be Prabha.
The second is that the Malayalam title "Prabhayayi Ninachathellam" is barely mentioned anywhere except in the film's subtitles. It's not mentioned anywhere online, it's not mentioned in the film listing on BookMyShow, not even on the ticket stub! Perhaps an Easter egg hatched and served exclusively to Malayalis by Payal and her Malayalam dialogue-writer Robin Joy?
I'm not qualified to critique film-making, but as someone who has spent way too many hours of his life watching films, I can honestly say that I found All We Imagine As Light wildly innovative in the way it experiments with framing and the very experience of film-watching. Just like God of Small Things experimented with language ("Orangedrink Lemondrink man") and Bandersnatch, with technology. The film is full of buried treasure - little joys for the audience to discover and shriek in delight- without ever being gimmicky or maximalist. At a time when any film deemed worthy of dubbing is glorified as a "Pan-Indian film", Payal Kapadia and team have made a deeply personal, truly universal film by looking inward and subverting the notion of something-for-everybody. It will be interesting to see how it influences other film makers to experiment with structure and storytelling.
Comments