What can one say about Payal Kapadia’s Cannes-winning debut feature, except that you probably haven’t seen it yet, because top awards often alienate regular audiences?
A still from All We Imagine As Light
Ever since Payal Kapadia’s film All We Imagine As Light entered public chatter, I’ve been referring to it by its abbreviation, AWIAL; inevitably unable to recall the long title, that’s a poetic verse.
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The film is wholly poetry in motion, mostly shot in static frames, playing with light, sounds, and time—speeding it up, and then slowing it down, between two completely divergent parts.
Avial is, of course, a popular Malayali vegetable stew. AWIAL is a Malayalam movie.
In fact, Payal, 38, tells me AWIAL has a Malayalam title as well: Prabhayai Ninachidalam. I don’t know if I’ve spelt that right.
“It’s basically a word-play,” Payal says. Prabha means light. “So, it’s Everything You Thought Of As Light; or, Everything That Prabha Thought Of.”
Filmmaker Payal Kapadia
Prabha (Kani Kusruti), being the film’s protagonist. The title then, as Payal also points out, refers to the film’s final sequences of magic realism, left to the audience’s interpretation.
Wherein Prabha imagines her absentee husband. The only contact with whom she’s had in the film is through a rice-cooker he sends her as an anonymous gift from Germany!
Prabha is a nurse. Which, in popular imagination, often equals a Malayalee, anyway. This association, Payal tells me, is accessed through religion—originating in the “Christian thought of giving.”
That, over time, became a lucrative vocation for the community, pushing young women swiftly, as bread-winners, into potentially international jobs, in Dubai, etc.
Payal says, “[The Malayali nurse] is the goose that lays golden eggs. It’s kinda like Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960) situation, where the protagonist’s entire life is about supporting the whole family.”
Hence, the nurse is also “almost a cliché in a Malayalam movie.” Take Mahesh Narayan’s Take Off (2017)—hostage drama, set in Iraq.
A subject that Salman Khan subsequently destroyed with the mainstream actioner, Tiger Zinda Hai (2017). Or Mathukutty Xavier’s Helen (2019), remade by the same director in Hindi, as Mili (2022), with Janhvi Kapoor.
What sets apart AWIAL—the film split into two sections; the latter placed in Ratnagiri, Konkan coast—is it’s in Malayalam, alright. But altogether a Mumbai/Bombay movie!
Writer Salman Rushdie once described Bombay’s lingua franca as HUG-ME. Meaning, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, English. The M there is obviously Marathi, not Malayalam. The M that AWIAL starts with is Maithili.
That’s the language native to north Bihar, where a migrant is presumably from, in the opening sequence, shot in the wholesale Dadar market that breaks at dawn, in central Mumbai—the part of the city that AWIAL shines a cold light on.
It’s instructive that I drive up to meet Payal on a 22nd floor, swanky office-space at Urmi Estate, in Parel—in the same mid-town Mumbai, if you may.
The exterior is like being inside her film—packed with stampeding pedestrians around five-feet tailoring and knick-knack shops.
You secede from the city then, in a second, through the main gate, wholly lost in the confusing driveway towards a concrete dystopia that follows.
The brutally economic K-shape literally curves upwards in these parts, that once provided for lakhs of blue-collar workers, in cotton mills, until the late 1980s.
Replaced since by malls and gated skyscrapers, that you enter through face-recognition screens and “OTP on your phone; it feels so unfriendly, no,” Payal sighs.
Tarpaulin-blue is the colour of Bombay, in AWIAL. Construction-drilling is its background score. Apart from sounds of heavy rains and moving trains, on occasion, interspersed with hypnotic notes on the piano.
AWIAL was the first Indian film to compete at Cannes in 30 years, picking up the top Grand Prix alongside.
Which, I suspect, can be damaging for a film that regular audiences thence distance as alienatingly boring/‘art-house’, without even giving it a shot. This perhaps explains my near-empty hall in Chembur.
Hardened cinephiles, on the other hand, incessantly pick holes. Because anything celebrated, over everything else before it, ought to be overrated, no? That’s inevitably intended as a knock on the rating than the
movie itself.
AWIAL stands on its own as a film on warm friendships—between three nurses (the naturally brilliant Kani, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam)—in a city of migrants, where strangers become families.
For, who else do they have? And what else do they know?
It’s also Payal’s debut feature that she made, simultaneously shooting-editing A Night Of Knowing Nothing (ANOKN, 2021) that also won the Best Documentary Film at Cannes. I haven’t seen ANOKN. “Too obscure [to get picked up] for OTT,” Payal says.
Clearly, she has a thing for long, verse-like titles that, she laughs, she may have to relook at: “They become hard to fit into posters!”
All We Imagine As Light is the title of a painting that her artist mother once made. A series of paintings is also a way to look at AWIAL, shot so lyrically by Ranabir Das.
The only other way to view the film, of course, is as a strong meditation on Mumbai.
Which is evidently more the “city of illusions” than dreams, that you actively believe in, in order to carry on, while the city itself continues to take your “resilient spirit” for granted.
Is this a toxic relationship? Hmmm… How would I know? I’m in it.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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