Staff Writer Meera Mohanraj explores the themes and artistic excellence of the highly acclaimed ‘All We Imagine As Light’ to foreground the controversy surrounding its exclusion as India’s Oscars entry.
The winner of the Cannes Grand Prix, Payal Kapadia’s immersive, realist film portrait of Mallu nurses in Mumbai is already a hit, but may be absent from the biggest stop on the award circuit tour.
Following two roommates, nurses Prabha and Anu, ‘All We Imagine As Light’ explores duality in identities, language and place. The film straddles Malayalam (the mother tongue of the two protagonists) and Hindi (the native tongue of Maharashtra). With lines of Marathi and Tamil also floating throughout the dialogue, the multiculturalism of the contemporary Mumbai is foregrounded.
While the exact age difference between the two characters is unknown, Anu calls Prabha “chechi” (a Malayalam term for one’s elder sister) and the years that separate them are illuminated in their behaviour, from attitudes toward relationships and lifestyle choices down to their haircuts. Although Prabha is married, her husband has lived in Germany since they wed. Anu, on the other hand, is secretly seeing a Muslim man despite her family’s encouragement to look for Hindu marital prospects.
The male characters are secondary to the central story of sisterhood, serving to unveil different aspects of Prabha and Anu. Their role strengthens the female solidarity emphasised by Kapadia, for in an unrelenting city and impossibly busy workplace, friendship becomes a necessary tool for survival where the men in their lives are absent.
It is a film of contrast and none is so stark as that of the urban/rural. The city is showed in suffocating close-ups, dense frames packed with dynamic action and luminous artificial lights. In rural Ratnagiri, however, the same delicate cinematography highlights a sparse beauty. Shots of the vast ocean are no wider than those of Mumbai – only stripped off the metropolitan excess. Both locales are predominantly portrayed with shaky handheld camerawork, which heightens the documentary-style that the film opens with and returns to when the camera drives past the real inhabitants of the city who exist outside of the narrative. These authentic moments amplify the resonance of the film, serving as a reminder that this is a story of people whose struggles related to class and social expectations are omnipresent in Mumbai and beyond.
‘All We Imagine As Light’ is ‘Prabhayay Ninachathellam’ in Malayalam. In many ways, this works much better than the English title, not least because it presents Prabha – her name meaning “light” – as the titular character. By depicting her alongside the elder nurse Paravathy and the junior Anu, we get a sense of evolving generational attitudes toward uniquely female issues and traditions rooted in misogyny. The film is then a journey toward lightness: the shrouded angst that the actress Kani Kusruti imbues into Prabha must be relieved for the film to be resolved.
Given the abundance of laudatory reviews to its name, many were quick to overlook the formality when the time came for the FFI (Film Federation of India) to select the country’s Oscar representative, assuming that the film “picked itself”. They were wrong; the honour was given to Kiran Rao’s Netflix hit ‘Laapataa Ladies’. Whilst the mixed-up-identities comedy has been well-received, the critical traction that Kapadia’s film has garnered peaked with its winning of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. An award of this vein puts the film on a trajectory of momentum, enough to propel one to Oscar success.
However, it seems that the decision-making process may not have been wholly artistic. Many noted that ‘Laapataa Ladies’ was produced by Jio Studios, the production company owned by billionaire Mukesh Ambani. An Oscar campaign is extremely expensive, so the common assumption is that the FFI did not choose the film they themselves deemed ‘Best Picture’ and instead opted for pragmatism, picking the one with potential to sustain the marketing marathon.
Kapadia herself, however, does not seem discouraged, only grateful. She has acknowledged the success of the film and noted that anything more “is a bonus to me”. In a recent Vanity Fair interview, she discerned that “the world is moving beyond these national boundaries. It would be nice if we embrace having a more open idea to cinema, where it’s not bound by its country, but more of a cinematic language or something that is connectable by everyone”. She then suggested that the current Oscars’ system is somewhat “archaic”.
It therefore appears that her multilingual film epitomises a forward movement, one towards the cinematic utopia she remarks on. That movement is boundaryless, able to tell a story of Malayali Mumbai-based health workers that provokes an eight-minute standing ovation on the French riviera.
