As the first Indian film to break a thirty year drought by featuring in the Competition line up at this edition of Cannes, Payal Kapadia’s ‘All We Imagine As Light’ comes riding with a billion peoples’ expectations.
Shaji N Karun’s ‘Swaham’, a Malayalam language film about a family trying to come to terms with a father’s death, made it to the Cannes competition in 1994: it may be a complete coincidence that Kapadia’s film has two Malayali nurses fronting a story which grapples with the complexities of leaving home, and finding roots.
I can’t deny that watching it at the first press show in Cannes was a matter of pride first and foremost, and then came the real job of separating the sobriquets ‘first Indian female director in Cannes competition/first Indian film after thirty years’, from the film itself, which is a meditative soliloquy on loneliness and connection, featuring striking performances from Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha, and solid supporting acts from Chhaya Kadam and Hridhu Haroon.
As the city which famously never sleeps but does succumb to the darkness of night, Mumbai stirring itself, preparing for dawn, getting moving on local trains, is a familiar sight. But in Kapadia’s film the trains are a crucial constant presence, as they carry Prabha (Kusruti) and Anu (Prabha) to their hospital, where work is, and then back to their tiny room for rest and respite.
As one of them says, who wouldn’t want to come to Mumbai where there are jobs and money? It is a statement which belies the constant struggle of its citizens to acquire a roof over their heads– Kadam plays Parvaty, a woman who has no ‘kaagaz’ to prove that she has lived in her house for over twenty years. The demolition squad is at her doorstep, and the prosperous lawyer Prabha takes Parvaty to is sympathetic to her cause, but says that there’s nothing he can do.
The dynamic between the older, much more conservative Prabha, who was ‘married off’ by her parents, and the younger, friskier Anu who has a ‘Muslim’ boy-friend (Haroon), shifts registers as we go along. What is Prabha’s husband doing in Germany, and why doesn’t he keep in touch? Is he even there? Kusruti, who has been wowing us with her recent performances, is just lovely, conveying a sense of loss with an economy of gesture and glance. Divya Prabha, allowed to be more expansive, both contrasts and complements her: both are women trying to discover their sense of self.
It is the fragility of these lives, and the tensile strength of these connections, which uses the city as a living, breathing palimpsest, that Kapadia weaves through her narrative. When the three women leave the big city for a short layover in a beautiful village by the sea, the claustrophobic spaces that they have been constrained in, opens up to the water, groves, and caves. It also leads the film into moments which are almost metaphysical.
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Some things happen here which do not appear to add up: is the near-dead man saved from drowning by Prabha, anyone she has known? These parts are left ambiguous. The constant tinkle of piano music calls attention to itself in places. But there isn’t any doubt that Kapadia has come up with a film that’s special: it plays with light and texture, and form and content, in an almost documentary style which is both sparse and lush.
The sisterhood of these women, who come together to give each other the support they need, at the exact time they need it, is the overriding factor which rounds things off. In parts poetic, in others prosaic, the light shines through.
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