Let me say this at the outset. Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light is not a bad film by any stretch of imagination. In fact it is a good film. And it comes with that mother of all tags – Winner of the Grand Prix in Cannes. And it comes with a history of an Indian film not making that cut for three decades. Also, I do not buy the rather specious argument some have made that the film peddles Indian poverty or shows India in a poor light. There are films that have done worse on that count. I remember a slew of films in the high noon of India’s arthouse cinema in the late 1970s which had characters vomiting on the camera and much worse. And of course there’s last year’s Animal – if there’s one film that showed India in a poor light, it was that.
At the same time, All We Imagine As Light is by no means the classic many critics have made it out to be. Yes, being the first winner of the Cannes Grand Prix in three decades is a matter of great pride. But does it say as much about the particular film as it does for the quality of Indian cinema in general? Is there something that All We Imagine As Light says that we have actually not seen in Indian cinema (even over the last 30 years)? Or says it in a manner that is innovative? In terms of technique or performances? Does a film deserve all that fawning press only because it comes certified by Cannes?
Consider Suman Ghosh’s The Scavenger of Dreams. In terms of the subject matter, Scavenger goes where few Indian films in the last decade and more have dared. As also the world it creates and the way it does so through its cinematography and production design. The lead performances (Shardul Bhardwaj and Sudipta Chakraborty) sear your conscience like few films have done in recent times. On each parameter, The Scavenger of Dreams is a better film.
Even the aspects of All We Imagine As Light that most are fawning over; for example, the way the city of Bombay has been projected, the feminine bonding. None of these are unique in any way. Films have done this before and done this better. Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay (1988) is a case in point. Even 36 years later the film is as tough to watch, despite being leavened by the occasional raw, bruising humour. Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s films – from Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai to Saleem Langde Pe Mat Ro to Naseem – are films that have brought the city to life with an authenticity few have managed. Of course, Ram Gopal Varma-Anurag Kashyap’s Satya portrayed Bombay like few mainstream films have. These are films that throb with life.
It is actually hard to imagine the film having to do anything with light!
All We Imagine As Light, in contrast, comes across as sterile. It begins with documentary-like footage of the city, its chaos, speeding traffic and trains, complete with voiceovers by various ‘migrant’ women. And it seldom gets out of that documentary feel. The camerawork is largely focused on showing us a wet, overcast Mumbai, its darkness and drabness accentuated by the lurking highrises glittering in the background which do nothing to alleviate the oppression these characters might be feeling (an oppression that seldom communicates itself to the viewer).
The film’s title gets pretty ironic here – it is actually hard to imagine the film having to do anything with light. I am told that the Malayalam title Prabhayai Ninachidalam is a wordplay on the meaning of the name of its lead character, Prabha, which means light. So the title translates to ‘Everything That Prabha Thought Of As Light’. Which probably accounts for the little we have in the film as light, because Prabha’s world is not one marked by a lot of light.
Yes, it is possible that the characters in the film, led by Nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti), have lives that do not possess any vitality. The city does that to people. Yet, can that be an excuse for the film lacking in energy? There is nothing in these characters or the narrative that made me say, ‘Wow! Now that’s something I have not seen before.’ One of the main reasons for the lack of animation owes itself to Kusruti’s almost single-note performance, telegraphing life’s burdens on an immobile face. It’s a frustratingly ‘alien’ performance.
In fact, the only time the film comes alive, when it lets go of the ‘heavy’ arty-ness that hangs over it like a shroud, and ultimately sinks it, is when the two other protagonists – Anu (Divya Prabhu) and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) – jive to the pulsating beats of RD Burman’s ‘Daiyya yeh main kahan aa phansi’ in a bout of ‘drunken’ revelry. It is also the only time when people at the show at which I watched the film got animated, which says a lot about popular Hindi film music.
For the rest, barring the background score, All We Imagine As Light is a bleak and drab affair that offered me nothing new in terms of narrative, technique, the characters, feminine bonding, the city of Mumbai, that I have not watched before and watched better. Consider, for example, the sequence where Prabha comes upon the cooker tucked away under a cupboard. The moment she does that, I told myself that she would pull it to herself and clasp it between her legs. And she does just that. It is supposed to be a metaphor for suppressed physical desire. But one has come across sequences like these dime a dozen in the so-called ‘hatke’ films so that a sequence that should be charged with sensuality comes with an overbearing sense of déjà vu.
There are the tentative engagements with issues of ‘contemporary’ relevance. There’s an affair between a Muslim man and a Hindu woman, complete with a gratuitous lovemaking scene. There’s the building mafia that evicts hapless people with the threat of violence. There are the pointed references to having papers to prove you belong, the burden of the ‘kaagaz’ in today’s India. There is the aspect of people having to work at minimum wages, the lack of any private, personal space, and what that does to people. Most of which is undone with inanities like ‘Mumbai is a city of dreams. No, it is one of illusions’ or that final comment Prabha makes at the seaside shack after that absurd sequence involving a man washing up on the beach: ‘It’s beautiful here too.’ Or something to that effect. Right.
Do we need 100 minutes of All We Imagine As Light to realise that? My gripe is not that the film peddles exotic poverty to the West – it does not really – but that it peddles so little in terms of breaking new ground. If the hosannas heaped on the film hadn’t raised my expectations sky-high, making it sound like the next best thing after Satyajit Ray and Pather Panchali, I would have probably seen the film in a more positive light. For now, I am wondering if everyone else saw the same film as I did.
(Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri is a film and music buff, editor, publisher, film critic and writer)
