For all we imagine as Mumbai

Ever since Payal Kapadiarsquos film All We Imagine As Light entered public chatter Irsquove been referring to it by its abbreviation AWIAL inevitably unable to recall the long title thatrsquos a poetic verseThe film is wholly poetry in motion mostly shot in static frames playing with light sounds and timemdashspeeding it up and then slowing it down between two completely divergent partsAvial is of course a popular Malayali vegetable stew AWIAL is a Malayalam movieIn fact Payal 38 tells me AWIAL has a Malayalam title as well Prabhayai Ninachidalam I donrsquot know if Irsquove spelt that rightldquoItrsquos basically a wordplayrdquo Payal says Prabha means light ldquoSo itrsquos Everything You Thought Of As Light or Everything That Prabha Thought OfrdquoFilmmaker Payal KapadiaPrabha Kani Kusruti being the filmrsquos protagonist The title then as Payal also points out refers to the filmrsquos final sequences of magic realism left to the audiencersquos interpretationWherein Prabha imagines her absentee husband The only contact with whom shersquos had in the film is through a ricecooker he sends her as an anonymous gift from GermanyPrabha is a nurse Which in popular imagination often equals a Malayalee anyway This association Payal tells me is accessed through religionmdashoriginating in the ldquoChristian thought of givingrdquoThat over time became a lucrative vocation for the community pushing young women swiftly as breadwinners into potentially international jobs in Dubai etcPayal says ldquoThe Malayali nurse is the goose that lays golden eggs Itrsquos kinda like Ritwik Ghatakrsquos Meghe Dhaka Tara 1960 situation where the protagonistrsquos entire life is about supporting the whole familyrdquoHence the nurse is also ldquoalmost a clicheacute in a Malayalam movierdquo Take Mahesh Narayanrsquos Take Off 2017mdashhostage drama set in IraqA subject that Salman Khan subsequently destroyed with the mainstream actioner Tiger Zinda Hai 2017 Or Mathukutty Xavierrsquos Helen 2019 remade by the same director in Hindi as Mili 2022 with Janhvi KapoorWhat sets apart AWIALmdashthe film split into two sections the latter placed in Ratnagiri Konkan coastmdashis itrsquos in Malayalam alright But altogether a MumbaiBombay movieWriter Salman Rushdie once described Bombayrsquos lingua franca as HUGME Meaning Hindi Urdu Gujarati English The M there is obviously Marathi not Malayalam The M that AWIAL starts with is MaithiliThatrsquos the language native to north Bihar where a migrant is presumably from in the opening sequence shot in the wholesale Dadar market that breaks at dawn in central Mumbaimdashthe part of the city that AWIAL shines a cold light onItrsquos instructive that I drive up to meet Payal on a 22nd floor swanky officespace at Urmi Estate in Parelmdashin the same midtown Mumbai if you mayThe exterior is like being inside her filmmdashpacked with stampeding pedestrians around fivefeet tailoring and knickknack shopsYou secede from the city then in a second through the main gate wholly lost in the confusing driveway towards a concrete dystopia that followsThe brutally economic Kshape literally curves upwards in these parts that once provided for lakhs of bluecollar workers in cotton mills until the late 1980sReplaced since by malls and gated skyscrapers that you enter through facerecognition screens and ldquoOTP on your phone it feels so unfriendly nordquo Payal sighsTarpaulinblue is the colour of Bombay in AWIAL Constructiondrilling is its background score Apart from sounds of heavy rains and moving trains on occasion interspersed with hypnotic notes on the pianoAWIAL was the first Indian film to compete at Cannes in 30 years picking up the top Grand Prix alongsideWhich I suspect can be damaging for a film that regular audiences thence distance as alienatingly boringlsquoarthousersquo without even giving it a shot This perhaps explains my nearempty hall in ChemburHardened cinephiles on the other hand incessantly pick holes Because anything celebrated over everything else before it ought to be overrated no Thatrsquos inevitably intended as a knock on the rating than themovie itselfAWIAL stands on its own as a film on warm friendshipsmdashbetween three nurses the naturally brilliant Kani Divya Prabha Chhaya Kadammdashin a city of migrants where strangers become familiesFor who else do they have And what else do they knowItrsquos also Payalrsquos debut feature that she made simultaneously shootingediting A Night Of Knowing Nothing ANOKN 2021 that also won the Best Documentary Film at Cannes I havenrsquot seen ANOKN ldquoToo obscure to get picked up for OTTrdquo Payal saysClearly she has a thing for long verselike titles that she laughs she may have to relook at ldquoThey become hard to fit into postersrdquoAll We Imagine As Light is the title of a painting that her artist mother once made A series of paintings is also a way to look at AWIAL shot so lyrically by Ranabir DasThe only other way to view the film of course is as a strong meditation on MumbaiWhich is evidently more the ldquocity of illusionsrdquo than dreams that you actively believe in in order to carry on while the city itself continues to take your ldquoresilient spiritrdquo for grantedIs this a toxic relationship Hmmmhellip How would I know Irsquom in itMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper