Travel back with me across all those years. Travel with me all the way back to 1963, 60 years into India’s past. Into the world’s past.
Move with me. Move with me across the space of a country as vast as a continent. Travel with me from western Mumbai to eastern Kolkata.
Come with me, we can imagine legendary Indian director Satyajit Ray saying. Come with me across that time and across that space. Come with me and you will see what I saw in the land of my youth. See what I saw in my time and my place.
We can imagine Ray inviting modern director Payal Kapadia to take this journey with him, and it is possible she has already left. Perhaps she has already made the journey. We can envision Kapadia there alongside Prabha in the subway car in her film All We Imagine as Light, holding onto the vertical bar and yet suspended in mid-air with the tide of India rushing by her. Ray’s artistic voice is beckoning her to come, and she is coming. Maybe it is this journey that led her to All We Imagine as Light. After all, it is a film that imagines the women of an Indian city finding that beautiful city racing by them as they are suspended in mid-air.
1963 was when Satyajit Ray directed The Big City in his very own Kolkata. In that film, a stay-at-home Indian wife and mother named Arati makes the decision to venture out into the world of work. When she realizes that her family is struggling with her husband as sole breadwinner, she breaks a cultural taboo and takes a job as a salesgirl. Arati spends much of the movie floating uncertainly in the midst of the suspicion of in-laws and her husband’s sense of inferiority. By the end, though, her feet have touched a ground that is solid with a sense of fulfillment. She has found joy in her work, but ultimately an even deeper joy in the healing of the relationships with those family members.
In Kapadia’s own All We Imagine as Light, Like Ray’s film, finding money can be difficult, and women have to face that reality in a world built for men. In the modern day of Kapadia’s film, though, we see all of the central female characters fully employed in a Mumbai hospital. It is one of the film’s simple joys to see each of these women bringing their gifts to their work roles, and we can see in these scenes a sort of fulfillment of Arati’s promise made to her sleeping husband in The Big City : “I’m going to get a job.”
We see Prabha working as a head nurse in the hospital, leading other nurses through their orientation and diligently reproving her patients for hiding their meds. Prabha’s roommate Anu is also a nurse, and we see her sassy irreverence in the way she reminds a patient asking for contraceptives that the government will give her husband a reward for undergoing a vasectomy. Then there is their friend Parvathy, a cook at the hospital who shares stories of her unstable living situation as she is cleaning the cafeteria dishes.
I have mentioned the way in which Kapadia’s women, like Arati, are suspended in mid-air in their own big city. Prabha and Anu, first of all, are living many stories above the ground in their high-rise apartment building. We see the view from their home filled with endless other windows in a shot suffused with the wonder and loneliness of the big, impossible world outside. Each of the windows suggests another life, but these are lives going on somewhere else while Prabha herself pines for a missing husband. The confusion of the husband’s absence itself also leaves Prabha floating and unable to plant her feet firmly on any ground. Anu and Parvathy are similarly dangling in ways that relate to men or the memory of them.
Do these women’s feet, like Arati’s, ever get to touch the ground? With the grace of a filmmaking vision as vivid as that of Ray in the mid-20th century, Kapadia shows us the ways they don’t and the ways they do. On the one hand, they don’t reach the ground because too much of their future is undecided. Will Prabha ever find a salve for her loneliness? Will Anu find a love that lasts a lifetime rather than just the ephemeral pleasures of the now? Will Parvathy find a home that is real and life-giving?
On the other hand, we see some firm ground forming under their feet. This is true especially for the forlorn Prabha. She is gifted with an astonishing moment near the end that allows her to reckon with her past. Having done that, she is freed to land on the firm ground of community, the firm ground of friends who can tether her to her present reality. She may not land as emphatically as Arati did 60 years ago, but at least she can land on a ground that gives her a place to dream about the light. There is at last a hope that the light she is beginning to remember may be real and not just imagined.
DISCLAIMER : A screener was provided to me for this film.
