The Mystical Nightscape of Payal Kapadia

The Mystical Nightscape of Payal Kapadia

All We Imagine as Light is a captivating drama directed by Payal Kapadia. Set in Mumbai, the film revolves around two nurses: Prabha and her younger roommate, Anu. Prabha’s routine is disrupted when she unexpectedly receives a gift from her estranged husband. Meanwhile, Anu struggles to find a private spot in the bustling city to be intimate with her boyfriend. However, their lives take an intriguing turn when they embark on a trip to a beach town. There, they discover a space where their desires can manifest freely. Notably, the film made history as the first Indian film to compete at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival in 30 years. With its compelling narrative and well-drawn characters, this movie has garnered critical acclaim, and was recognised with the Grand Jury Prize.

Misty (obscure)—this seems to be a visual and character movement style that extends throughout Payal Kapadia's film. Compared to her previous works, this film adds a layer of indistinctness brought about by the city's continuous nighttime. When all visible matter is overshadowed by the darkness and faint artificial lights, the film focuses on the internal connections and subtle differences among several women from Kerala living in Mumbai. Kapadia, along with these women, remains acutely aware from beginning to end that Mumbai is a city of contradictions【1】. Mumbai at night is mysterious, vivid, and unsettling. During the monsoon season, blue plastic sheets cover the city like monochromatic neon lights. In this lifeless, dysfunctional landscape, spirituality arises and flows among the characters. Even though women can find better work opportunities here than in any other Indian city, this ever-expanding, indescribable town, with its vast and chaotic settlements, can hardly be called "urban." These settlements are at the center of the city's scenery, but their imbalance prevents them from forming a coherent world. The characters move through juxtaposed moments in time, navigating through street vendors' alleys, and towering transportation hubs at night, ultimately ending up with the dim light of shared apartments and the glow of phone screens. Throughout, the quantifiable blue light does not differ in essence; what exists is the stark, enigmatic disparity in the city's form. Kapadia's imagery gently captures the contradictions and dysfunctions of this city in the haze.

The opening set of vaguely recognisable point-of-view shots reveals Prabha as an exile, travelling home on the commuter train after a long day's work, gazing out over the neighbourhood, grasping a pole to maintain her balance during the monsoon season, as the high-speed footage accompanies Ethiopian composer Emahoy's piano music, bodies swaying... In the myriad situations where darkness and the monsoon's humidity overwhelm the physical and material things, the few events that could constitute a sense of clarity are especially precious. What we call events of "clarity" are moments where nodes of meaning that are actually revealed: Anu's adoption of the pregnant stray cat in the house, which creates a potential bond between the two, and the moment Prabha unwraps a gift from her husband in faraway Germany—an electric pot. This reflective object stands out as peculiar and oddly alter in the dilapidated rental room, starkly different from the diffuse bluish light pervading the city area. Due to her cowardice and character of sensitivity to light, Prabha has to hide it under the sink, these rare nodes of clarity open up the dreamlike, intrinsic drama of the plot that follows(The identity of the husband is never explained, and his presence is entirely equivalent to that of the gift, a misty and disorientating presence that still exerts pressure on Prabha's situation or direction). What is the husband's intention in sending a gift that is so inopportune for this circumstance, and does it signify hope for the fusty arranged marriage, or is it a clean break? The infinite number of possible distinct directions for the self, and its gradual dissolution in the enigmatic plot development that follows, is the subtlety of this kind of node setting: there is only the possibility of a prolonged elaboration of the images and the characters' situations, as well as the minimal use of the characters' discourses for the construction of meanings.

A couple of sequences shot at the hospital nurse's office are very Kapadia: firstly, Prabha comes into contact with an old lady who cannot accept that her husband is dead and is immersed in visions; their colleague is forced to leave Mumbai because he has lost his property certificate; and also, at the nurse's office (one of the few shots in the film that captures the city in the daytime), a 24 year old already forced to give birth to three childrenThe woman comes for help and after some exchange Anu privately gives the woman some contraceptive pills, and even though there is a cruel and compassionate mood embedded in this situation for a short while, the next shot's animated performance then dissolves, or rather, escapes the continued immersion in it — Anu's occasional use of sign language is also a gesture of humor amidst compassion and oppression, a kind of non-normal performance, how is this different from the unexplained knee pain and staggering walk depicted in "Afternoon Clouds" (2017)? This is a physical non-normality, accompanied by the verbal non-normality expressed between lovers in that short film. In "A Night of Knowing Nothing" (2021), the naïve narration and the collage of historical footage remain true to this kind of pure non-normality, resembling a fugue where continuous elements are pieced together over time, meanwhile, all the characters' tranquil bodies exist synchronously.

What is not explicit is that Prabha's search in the urban haze is almost an ambivalent standing still (the phantom husband haunts her, leaving her troubled as to whether she should accept the doctor's overtures of affection), while Anu's search is a dynamic romp — she and her boyfriend Shiaz (obviously is a Muslim name) are constantly searching in vain for a place of rendezvous in the city, and there's a kind of self-evident marital taboo about the differences in their backgrounds, so how do they manage to truly mesh? To the promised land, but this promised land doesn't exist in this monotonous urban of fading auras, so their dreamlike and agonising search here is almost tautological, and is constantly dissolved by the gentle qualities of the images. In the later part of the film, after they are led by their friend Parvaty to the coastal village of Ratnagiri, the plot evolves as a divine revelation, but remains in a trance - this lack of clarity is the mist of healing and purification, the wall-carvings in the caves that symbolise spirituality, the wiped down wounded bodies (the subject of this trance in the form of a body that is foreshadowed in "And What Is The Summer Saying") ...

"All We Imagine as Light", the title of the film declare publicly, when in the midst of a life situation that develops into a horrific descent into monotony (the extremely high humidity and monochromatic tones of the rainy season in Mumbai), as in the case of the two Indian women in the film, who are adrift in the hollow world of forms in Mumbai, the light shown in the images, that is, in their visions, has itself become an essentially musical elementand when one establishes such a mechanism through vision (as one establishes the point-of-view lens belonging to Prabha at the beginning), one thereby escapes (through a vividly non-normal performance) from the deadening detention of auroras faded. Kapadia's specific writing forms may not be very original most of the time, but its national cultural concepts always emerge as perceptible forms as the light transforms and maintains its unencumbered lightness of circumstance, just as the ancient writings in the caverns do. The final scene at the end is still answered by light.

REFERENCE

【1】Payal Kapadia interview: “Making films about women isn’t a choice—It’s what I need to do”

https://www.a-rabbitsfoot.com/editorial/confessions/payal-kapadia-interview-all-we-imagines-as-light/

write by Current89