When I read the description for Payal Kapadia’s tender All We Imagine As Light, I felt I read the summary for a European film or a Hong Sang Soo film, which are of course, very deceptively simple.
Keeping this synopsis in mind, while I was watching the film, I could only describe the summary as what Dr.Manoj says his poem writing is: “Just a hobby”. It felt as if, the film had a personality of its own, a person, and the summary was one of its interests. That doesn’t mean the film is vast(in its “plot”) and I don’t mean this in a negative way. It is very focused and singular in its intention to showcase Prabha’s state of mind, which fascinated me.
It addressed one of the major conundrums that I have had for quite some time, which is the question of how to represent a person thinking about one thing. The easier(or mainstream or simpler) option is to use jumpcuts to show them in different positions of the same place and the “art-sier” way would be to use a long take like how Lav Diaz apparently does it.
Now my conundrum was (out of the interest to seem different) how to represent someone thinking, apart from these 2 methods? Doing either one would mean doing what was already present and also burden my film with the difficulty of an art film or the disrespect of a mainstream film.
What Payal Kapadia does to Kani Kasruti’s Prabha is surrounding her with people who represent things that mirror her thinking. Now this doesn’t mean I have fully entered Prabha’s state of mind , but only based on my understanding of what I have seen(and not based what I have seen). Prabha’s is shown to be in constant correspondence with Chayya Kadam’s terrific Parvathy, a woman who refuses to give up her house to a builder who is threatening her to give up her house, which she adamantly refuses to give up. When offered by Prabha to share her room, Parvathy asks with a rightful arrogance as to why she must vacate her “own” house, one she has lived in for 22 years.
The 3rd (or rather 2nd) character in this setup is Divya Prabha’s young and naïve Anu, who has a “Muslim” boyfriend (which everyone gossips about in her and Prabha’s workplace where they are nurses) and their interaction with each other is physical. Making out, in the process of making out or having just finished making out (which happens once on screen), they represent (what I think) the intimacy or security that Prabha seems to miss. She is present in between these 2 wonderful women who also complement Prabha by virtue of their marital status. Parvathy is a widow, Anu has a boyfriend but Prabha is in a situation which is a mix of these two. She is married but her husband is working in Germany and it has probably been a year since they last talked.
Prabha, as Parvathy describes, is a good woman. She is very caring about Anu, who is Prabha’s roommate, advicing her to save money and admonishing her for “flirting” with a senior doctor. This senior doctor is the aforementioned Dr.Manoj, who is a loner (seemingly) like Prabha and Anu in the MahaNagar that is Mumbai. He gives(fts) Prabha a poem (in a book) he had written, supposedly for a poem competition in their monthly magazine. She gets it in the same day that a surprise delivery for her arrives: a rice cooker which is “Made In Germany”.
We never know till the end if it actually was sent by her husband or not. But what we know is, post the arrival of that gift, an unease creeps over Prabha from that day. She reads the poem and in it, Manoj expressed how she is the lamp that lights his day and she slowly closes the book. When he later informs her about leaving the city and asks her if he should stay, she plainly says she is married.
It is also after that day that we actually see Anu and her lover together in the same frame, in a beautifully staged tracking shot (which reminded me of Godard’s famous (or puluthi) quote “A tracking shot is a moral act” considering we just hear her colleagues gossiping wrongly about her in the preceding scene).
Anu is a person who like Cliff Booth, lives in the present. Parvathy lives in the past. Prabha is trying build up a future but a connection to her past makes her lose her present. When Prabha shares her story about how she married her husband, Anu is affected by it. When Parvathy mentions she will go back to her village, Prabha is affected by it. Throughout, we subconsciously realise how Prabha’s interaction with the rice cooker has affected her thoughts but it never is forcibly implied.
Like when Prabha scolds Anu for “flirting” with Dr.Manoj, we realise that Prabha is probably fighting her own will to talk to another man. She later apologises to Anu in a brilliantly staged scene which is as natural as breathing is.
All of this confusion comes to an “end”, when Anu and Prabha go to Parvathy’s village to help her shift and certain events take place that changes Prabha’s state of mind. I didn’t fully understand them and I probably need a 2nd watch.
But what I know I know for sure is Prabha isn’t tied to her past anymore. And I’m happy for Payal to have documented that journey so brilliantly.
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