All We Imagine as Light

പ്രഭയായ് നിനച്ചതെല്ലാം
Prabhayay Ninachathellam)

dir: Payal Kapadia

2024

All We Imagine as Light is something of an enigma, at least for me. I thought I knew where it was coming from, and numerous times I was proven wrong.

I had it slotted into the types of films from India that are more about social realism than the flamboyant spectacle we’re more stereotypically used to. I have seen enough older Indian films to also know about the ones where the horribleness of the upper castes and the eternally put-upon lower castes are paraded around for our amusement / horror for three hours a pop.

But this is not that. This isn’t about the unfairness of the system, or institutional abuses or cartoonish selfishness. This is just about people trying to get by, in a society that is pretty constraining upon women (unlike all those other ones).

The three women the movie mostly focusses on are Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha) and Parvathy (Chhaya Kadam). Prabha and Anu are nurses, while Parvathy works as a cook in the same hospital all three work in. Before we even meet these women, there are night time scenes of market stalls being set up pre-dawn, or general city scenes and packed train platforms in Mumbai, as voice recordings, sounding like legit vox pops, talk about how desirable or how difficult it is having moved from the country to the city for work.

Later on in the film one of these voices says something along the lines of “they say this city is the City of Dreams, but I think it’s more a city of illusions. You have to believe the illusion, or else you go mad.”

That’s hardly a ringing endorsement of city living. Other than their place of work, the other element they share is that all three are from Kerala, which is on the south-western Malabar coast, and thus they’re originally Malayali, meaning their native tongue is Malayalam, as opposed to the Hindi they are expected to speak in Mumbai.

I don’t think it’s a minor detail. I’m not pretending I know the difference between the languages, nor am I making reference to cultural ethnographic differences between people from Kerala versus any other state. But I think at the very least it’s meant to show that these three women are dislocated from their origins, and that it has effects both tiny and more impactful.

Prabha, who is in a senior nurse at her job, is serious and distant from her co-workers mostly. It doesn’t take long to find out that she was married by her family to a man who returned immediately after the wedding to Germany, and she has seen neither hide nor hair of him since. At first she received calls, which dwindled to nothing, and if she calls his number she gets a message in German that might say the number is disconnected.

When she receives a German-made rice cooker, she doesn’t use it, but she does hug it, longing not for the man himself, but for what he represents. She is in a limbo not of her making, and she has no way out, which is somewhat infuriating. She’s essentially a widow with her husband still alive, still out there somewhere as an indistinct, blurry shape.

It compromises her relationships with other people. It represents an insurmountable obstacle, and as such it brings sadness, and jealousy. Anu, the younger of the two, not only lives with Prabha and works under her as a subordinate, but essentially calls her “big sister”.

Anu’s on a completely different trajectory. She has a secret love, being a young Muslim boy called Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), yet it seems like pretty much everyone at the hospital knows about it except Prabha. Still, they take steps so as to not be too obvious. It’s more than going through the motions. At one stage it looks like she’ll be able to sneak her way into his neighbourhood on a particular night, but she has to go to the trouble of purchasing and wearing a burqa, just to spend time with him.

And by “spend time with him” I mean for them to have sex. They’re not hanging out and blankly doomscrolling on their phones; no, whenever they can they get together for the hot and sweaty stuff.

But this is a gossipy town, and worse than that, you know, there are people in India who have been disowned or killed by their families for less. Putting caste aside completely the fact that he’s Muslim means her mother, who obsessively keeps calling and messaging her with pics of (Hindu) chaps from matchmaking sites, probably wouldn’t talk to her ever again if she found out.

Though they are roommates, it seems like Anu is a bit of a deadbeat, asking “big sister” if she can carry her again for this month’s rent. What’s she spending her money on, we have no idea, but it’s not even about that. This flick isn’t, which surprised me, about how it’s economically hard to get by for the people on the lower rungs of Mumbai society – it’s about the emotional peril of trying to get by in the big city, the heart-rending difficulties, the desperate loneliness, and the longing for connection.

Parvathy doesn’t care about none of that nonsense. As an actual widow, it’s not love or affection she’s after: developers are threatening her and trying to kick her out of the chawl, or shanty accommodation that she’s been living in for over twenty years. As her husband left her nothing that proves ownership of the site, the shitty builders can monster her with no repercussions.

On a night when Prabha and Parvathy are feeling particularly rebellious, the two throw rocks at one of the developer’s signs, a sign that literally says on it, in English: “Class is a privilege reserved for the privileged”.

No shit, Einstein. This is still all in vain, though, since Parvathy decides she’s not going to fight progress no more, and decides to leave her job and move back to her village on the coast, where her parental home still stands, without the obstacle of parents within it.

Prabha’s life, for all the professionalism and diligence she displays in her work, seems to leave her in a bind, which makes her miserable. A doctor from I’m guessing a similar background, who struggles a bit with Hindi, makes his interest in her known, even writes her some poetry, but she feels like that’s a false choice. She has no leeway in this community to pursue a relationship with an interested man, even if she’s been long abandoned. It doesn’t seem like an option, at least not a healthy option.

Prabha’s first response, after gossip starts up about Anu, is to lash out. It’s not much of a stretch for us to think that it might be out of envy. She uses some fairly harsh words against this poor girl. And yet moments later we can hear in her voice how much she regrets how she spoke, telling Anu that she made her her favourite meal for dinner, as a peace offering.

If you’re wondering what the right meal is to make up for slut-shaming someone who looks up to you with every fibre of her being, apparently it’s a chili fish curry, with some Goan spices.

So, if the first half is about how much it wears down your heart to live and work in a metropolis like Mumbai, the second half of the film is about how awesome it would be to live on the coast, in a quiet, simple fishing village. Sucks for the fish, but it’s great for everyone else! Parvathy’s decision to move home somehow obligates Prabha and Anu to come with her and help her carry stuff, but let’s be honest it’s not like they’ve got anything better to do. Plus Anu doesn’t let the distance from the city impact on her love life at all – with probably no arm twisting involved, Shiaz has come along for the / a ride as well.

The things I’m writing; it makes it sound like a densely plotted flick, but it doesn’t feel like that at all. There’s no plot, really, it just unfolds at a leisurely pace, and once they get close to the ocean, it all transpires at an even more leisurely pace, as if to emphasise how much easier life is away from the big city. Prabha’s concerns, which seem to bring her so much unhappiness, seem to fade away, once she has the strangest encounter after saving a drowning man’s life.

This sequence, which I won’t spoil too much, is amazing, but I don’t think it’s either a) magical realism or b) meant to be taken in any way literally, and yet it’s such a lovely sequence, perhaps offering Prabha some solace from her longstanding grief, allowing her to show some other sides to her character.

Maybe the film ends on a hopeful note, or a note of acceptance, but I'm not even entirely sure.

It’s beautifully done. The film overall seems a bit lighter, a bit less serious than I thought it would be, and to that extent it surprises me a bit that it’s been as successful as it has, even having been nominated for Best Foreign Film for 2024 at the Oscars, which it didn’t win, which, not to be rude, doesn’t surprise me.

Most of the people voting for these films are members of the Academy. There are many thousands of them. They used to be sent screeners, but now I guess they use the app where they can stream the movies they’re meant to be voting on.

I find it hard to believe that most of the Academy members, many of whom are over 70, made it to the end of this flick. I am also not convinced they know how to use the app without a lot of help from younger family members, but that’s a different argument.

This flick was meditative, and enjoyable to watch (for me), but I’m not sure it is as deep as its pretentious title would imply, nor do I think most audiences are primed for this kind of experience unless they enjoy slow movies with not much of a point to them. It’s at the very least a different perspective from the ones we’re used to. By ‘we’ I’m talking about non-Indian viewers, no need to get culturally specific or nothin’.

7 times all the light that I can’t see with my eyes closed out of 10

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“You might think you know someone, but they can also become strangers.” – and that hurts even more - All We Imagine as Light