All We Imagine As Poetry

'Did anyone else get the feeling that AWIAL -- despite being ostensibly based in the Mumbai of today -- is actually set in a Neverland of Solemnity?' asks Sreehari Nair.

When Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light was released in Kerala last year, people reacted as though they were thrust into a 'nudie movie' without any advance preparation.

I specifically recall a young gentleman, decked out to look like a card-carrying film festival type, emerging from the dark room and complaining, 'I could see nothing except bare breasts and bare behinds. Is that all it takes to impress the Cannes jury?'

This gentleman's romance with 'art-house cinema' was over before it had a chance to take hold. Needless to say, he was shaking.

Though I feel tenderly towards honest tremors, I think All We Imagine As Light (AWIAL) is at its most interesting in its boldly bodily bits.

Not only are there candid shots of dress changes, there's also an instance of open-air wee-weeing worthy of Bertolucci, and a superbly told erection joke (Divya Prabha's cagey, cautious rendering gives the joke an unforgettable hum).

The scenes of squatting are majestic.

The self-touching is unselfconscious.

These moments are meant to underline the sensual nature of the protagonists' profession -- Divya and Kani Kusruti play nurses who are frequently up to their elbows in flesh, blood and guts. And when a lecture on placenta disposal is braided into the narrative, it all seems to come together: Kapadia has probably planned this one as a movie that's clawing its way out of a womb.

These are the hardcore-bedrock parts of AWIAL, the let-us-get-our-hands-dirty parts, the can-you-face-the-truth-without-flinching parts. They did have my attention, even as I felt slightly force-fed.

Now it's tragic that a movie that wishes to have its feet so firmly planted on the ground also has its head so obstinately in the clouds.

Please allow me, if you will, to express my peculiar peeves.

Did anyone else get the feeling that AWIAL -- despite being ostensibly based in the Mumbai of today -- is actually set in a Neverland of Solemnity?

Think about it: 'The times' seem to have little to no bearing on the story being narrated.

Those electronic distractions, which are so much a part of our everyday music, have almost completely been snuffed out.

Here's a movie that doesn't seem to understand that the corrupt drone of a ringtone has as much pulling power as the mist, the waves, as those grave disembodied voices and that dreamy staring into the camera.

Here's a movie that puts 'desire' and 'yearning' within quotation marks without letting them naturally emerge from the beep-beeping of text messages or the quack of an Instagram reel.

Payal Kapadia has a heroic distrust of newfangled devices and social media. But when she mounts a local train sequence in which faces are captured only for their piety and melancholy, and the beauty of a face just lost in her mobile phone or a face simply typing away is not heeded, the story stops being of this decade.

I am not exaggerating when I say that one of the most meaningful uses of a mobile phone in this movie is as a torch to read poetry at night.

All through AWIAL, I had the feeling of being subjected to an anachronism of the oddest sort.

This is Cinema-Verite but with a very selective view of Verite. And the deficit not only holds you at arm's length; it also ends up upsetting the emotional grid of the story.

The arc of a senior Malayali doctor who decides to leave Mumbai because he cannot keep pace with Hindi has a distinctly 1980s and 1990s ring to it.

If you have grown up in a big city through those decades, you would know that in today's hyper-connected electronic world 'language issues' and other such 'dislocations' are set to a more casual rhythm.

This is an age where the 'craving for solitude' is as strong as the 'struggle against loneliness.' Consequently, an immigrant of today experiences cultural deracination in a tenor very different from how he would have 25 years ago.

I am not saying that Kapadia's themes aren't universal, but she seems not to realise that those themes have been transmuted by time.

As I see it, AWIAL's conundrum is quite unique: it wants to plunge you headlong into the daily rigors of life, but it also wants to suspend or regulate certain inconvenient noises, manners and mores and instead play you a liberal tune.

Watch out for a scene in which Divya Prabha and her boyfriend go through pictures of her suitors, and notice how dumb and debauched each of those men has been made.

No artist with a commitment to such terms as 'sensitivity' and 'gaze' should have come up with characters so perfect for mocking.

That being said, I think the real issue here may be the absence of a truly democratic style of filmmaking.

A movie that tries so hard to get with the crowd -- The Gorgeous Mumbai Rhapsody, as a critic at The New Yorker calls it -- should have been more open to Happy Accidents.

It should have had more love for faces observed in passing and for lines overheard. It should never have felt so carefully worked-out or 'written.'

When Kapadia projects onto a cityscape the voiceover of a woman questioning the much-vaunted Spirit of Mumbai, it doesn't sound like an authentic working-class tirade, but rather the academic mind-dropping of someone who fancies herself a radical because an advertising tagline has troubled her soul.

A too-easily-troubled soul or not, Payal Kapadia seems to have the critics exactly where she wants them.

She seems to have them pinned at that precise point where direct response fails and empty epithets take over: Gentle, Delicate, Lyrical -- so go the critical hurrahs.

The operative meme here is Tarkovsky clutching his forehead and sighing, 'Ah, Poetic Cinema!' As for my honest non-Soviet opinion, I think the movie alternates between the work of a poet manqué and that of someone straining for poetry.

Had the strain been less evident, All We Imagine As Light might have stayed with you longer. Its cleverness is frequently held up for your approval, so that you don't catch anything out of the corner of your eye, and this works against making it memorable.

There's a breakup scene that I liked, and which at the same time is symptomatic of the problem I am talking about.

The scene has been staged at night, in a municipal park, with the man and the woman nestled inside two rusty swings. 'Lovers looking for a tiny corner of the city on which to perch their heavy hearts' -- the symbolism is striking.

But there's also a veiled exhibition of 'nuance' in that scene that deters you from giving yourself over to it. You can smell the sweat behind its conception, and that stops it from being affecting. The scene is a little too embellished to move you. It sniffs more of the park swings than the heavy hearts.

Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff.com