2024 Top Ten List #3 All We Imagine as Light (Prabhayay Ninachathellam)

 

Writer/director Payal Kapadia

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (Prabhayay Ninachathellam)           A                                      India  France  Netherlands  Luxembourg  Italy  USA  Belgium  (118 mi)  2024  d: Payal Kapadia 

Some people call this the city of dreams, but I don’t.  I think it’s the city of illusions.  You have to believe the illusion, or else you will go mad.                                                                             —part of the chorus of voices that opens the film

The first Indian film to premiere in competition at Cannes since Shaji N. Karun’s SWAHAM (1994) exactly 30 years ago, and the first Indian film by a female filmmaker to ever play at Cannes, winning the Grand Prix (2nd Place), the only Indian filmmaker to do so, though it really should have won the Palme d’Or over Sean Baker’s overwrought Anora, but apparently Jury President Greta Gerwig held sway with her American preference.  Building on her searing docufiction essay on militant youth, A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING (2021), which denounced the takeover of universities by Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government and was not distributed in India, unlike this film which has received congratulations from the highest levels of government (Cannes 2024: "India Is Proud Of You" PM Modi ...), this is a profoundly meditative, deeply compassionate almost spiritual evocation of the human condition at large, set in the pouring rain of contemporary Mumbai, centering on three female Hindu employees who work at the same hospital, each coming from small towns in southern India, as we follow their everyday lives and the bonds they share with each other.  The thought-provoking title, curiously enough, is borrowed from an expansive 11-panel painting (All We Imagine as Light (2017)) of the director’s mother, Nalini Malani, a well known painter and mixed-media artist in India, so the artistic lineage is passed down.  That title resonates throughout the film, like a Haiku poem, as the light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated in this eloquently lyrical and poetic film.  Kapadia spoke to nearly 200 people over the course of two years, asking them about a migrant’s experience of being in Mumbai for the first time, adding an extremely tender and humanistic perspective on a story that deals with the hardships women face in their daily lives where an established male patriarchy is overwhelmingly present, as women remain invisible in India, with Kapadia paying attention to the lives of those that contemporary India has conveniently forgotten, offering a nuanced take on how internalized patriarchy can also affect female friendships, given a novelistic scope, using characters as a mirror of society.  Among the most acclaimed films of the year, it would have been among the favorites to win the Best International Film at the Oscars, but the film was not nominated by India, choosing instead Kiran Rao’s more conventional LAAPATAA LADIES (2024), the kind of film the Indian government wants to promote, backed by some of the wealthiest men in the country.  As a director who is viewed as persona non grata in the Indian movie industry, literally shunned by the establishment, forced to make films on the margins, Kapadia has succeeded despite them, though in order to do so she has had to seek foreign funding, with Ravi Kottarakara, president of the Film Federation of India, explaining that the selection committee felt “that they were watching a European film taking place in India, not an Indian film taking place in India.”  While it is true that films co-produced in Europe often demand post-production in Europe, including European editors and film crews, which this film has, where the French editing does, in fact, shape the arthouse aesthetics, though the director spent two months working on the editing herself, yet there’s no mistaking this is a highly sensory and sensual film, where the many shades of light become a portal into this beguiling universe of what is, essentially, an independent film.  This is apparently more of an Asian problem in general, having a difficult time getting films produced in their own countries, especially for women in male-dominated industries, though the myopic view from an all-male selection committee may have had other motives as well.  Kapadia is a director who's been outspoken against injustices in her country and was among 35 students arrested during a 2015 midnight raid on the 68th day of a 139-day long campus protest against the government’s appointment of actor-turned-politician Gajendra Chauhan for the new chairman of the Film and Television Institute of India.  Kapadia was subsequently stripped of her scholarship and the chance to participate in a foreign exchange program, while the criminal case against her, and against several dozen fellow students, remains open nine years later and is scheduled for trial next summer.

A Malayalam-Hindi feature, this surprisingly intimate, meticulously constructed City symphony film opens with a series of voices, not from any of the main characters but from ordinary people on the streets, speaking openly about the everyday struggle of finding stability in the city, which recalls “There are eight million stories in the naked city” from Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948).  “The city takes time away from you,” we hear from one, while another laments that he’s lived in the same spot for over 20 years, but can’t bring himself to call it home, claiming “You’d better get used to impermanence.”  Mumbai is a city that bustles by day and glimmers by night, yet the opening sequence presents a market at closing time in a wide tracking shot during the monsoon season, beautifully shot by Ranabir Das in a cinéma vérité style, reminiscent of Chantal Ackerman’s D'Est (1993), capturing the essence of the city with its vibrant colors and incessant energy, filled with street vendors, car horns, crowded trains, narrow alleys, high-rise buildings, the rush of crowds, a tropical level heat, and clashing dialects, where the city distinguishes itself as an important character.  People have come from remote villages in India to try to make a living, with Kapadia capturing the random dynamics of everyday life in a patchwork of transitory spaces, small destinies carving out their own paths amidst a larger need for connection while finding a purpose in their lives, where the idea of home is complex.  A penetrating exploration of the lives of three working-class women and the transformative power of friendship, including Prabha (Kani Kusruti) who is initially seen in slow motion on a local train, like one of the unseen voices suddenly coming to life.  She is a quietly reserved, yet heavily trusted head nurse, married to a man she barely knows through a family-arrangement (a common story of countless Malayali women), an absent husband who left immediately after the marriage to work in Germany, having lost contact with him some time ago, where her life is left in limbo, now totally revolving around work, while her younger more carefree roommate Anu (Divya Prabha) is a free-spirited, new generation colleague who spends her days stuck on her phone secretly exchanging text messages with her Muslim boyfriend Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), someone her family (and fellow nurses) wouldn’t approve of, meeting him clandestinely, always trying to find out-of-the-way places to spend time alone.  When her family notifies her of their intentions to arrange her marriage, making it impossible to choose her own husband, she doubles down on her necessity for “real” love.  The older Parvati (Chhaya Kadam) works as a cook at the hospital, whose late husband handled all their assets and documents, without which she finds herself on the verge of being evicted from her modest home of 20 years, thanks to ruthless developers seeking to demolish the building in order to construct new high-rise buildings for Mumbai’s wealthy elite.  Economic progress is built upon the displacement and disenfranchisement of thousands of underprivileged and routinely exploited undocumented migrant workers, where a conspicuous sign outside reads “Class is a privilege reserved for the privileged.”  Recognizing only the husband as the sole owner, they refuse to acknowledge her or offer any compensation, where she sadly confesses, “Without papers, you could vanish into thin air.”  Prabha pushes away the affections of a doctor who’s clearly drawn to her, Doctor Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), often taking her aside, even writing her poems and baking sweets (unniappams), hoping to break through her wall of reserve, but her reluctance to reciprocate his feelings leaves her anxious and alone.  As they navigate the challenges of urban life, we see a mix of their personal desires and the societal constraints, reflective of three different generations, all while using the city’s teeming energy as a backdrop to illuminate their inner struggles and fleeting moments of connection, beautifully capturing the nuanced complexities of female friendship, offering a very profound statement on the value of women, who are otherwise completely overlooked and devalued in this society.   

With a terrific musical soundtrack by Topshe, whose real name is Dhritiman Das (the cinematographer’s brother), also the name of a fictional literary character in Satyajit Ray’s famous Feluda series, the score sounds very much like Brian Eno in its emotional transcendence, while also including brief impressionistic excerpts from Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’s The Homeless Wanderer - YouTube (7:07).  Prabha may be viewed as the lead protagonist (the name literally means “light,” Prabha Name Meaning, Origin & more), extremely dignified and ever helpful to others, an essential component of her job, going through an intense inner struggle, where it’s also clear she keeps her emotions completely bottled up, which comes in conflict with the more aggressively flirtatious Anu, the source of hospital gossip, reminding her of the price she could pay for her brazen actions.  Very few, if any Indian films show any traces of nudity (which will be cut in India), yet there’s a moment following an argument when Anu angrily yet purposefully bares her breasts while changing out of her wet clothes before her roommate Prabha, creating an intentional moment of discomfort with an assertive act of liberation, which in itself is a very bold statement. Conversely, when Anu has sex with her naked boyfriend, she keeps her clothes on, suggesting she’s an empowered woman fully capable of making her own choices in deciding what’s best for her in any given moment, where her impulsive spontaneity is always a pleasant surprise.  Relationships aren’t presented in dramatic or sentimental terms, but in these small gestures and shared silences.  Despite the crowded chaos of the nocturnal city, where lives are compressed within small spaces, accentuating the effects of transientness and alienation, there’s a beautiful moment when the nurses rush to the rooftop to pull the sheets hanging out to dry from the torrential monsoon rains, like a scene out of Angelopoulos’ ETERNITY AND A DAY (1998), while Kapadia also lingers on quiet, overlooked details, capturing the lights in a market or the peaceful early mornings, hinting at smaller, gentler moments.  Parvati finally gives up on her ongoing battle against eviction and with the help of her friends decides to move back to her coastal hometown, which completely alters the rhythm of the film, finally slowing down, increasingly growing more quietly introspective, capturing the tranquility and natural beauty of the sea and the surrounding world, reminiscent of Hirokazu Kore-eda's Maborosi (Maboroshi no hikari) (1995) in the delicate scenes by the sea.  Not only is this an opportunity to explore various facets of femininity and the hardships they face throughout their lives, but leaving behind Mumbai feels like an important journey where they will find some form of autonomy, where the mystical forest meeting the sea becomes a space for their unfulfilled dreams to manifest.  While there’s no trace of melodrama, or any hint of stereotype, sometimes the artifice of film can help accentuate hidden truths that might otherwise remain hidden and never be seen, yet this film exposes so many layers of untold stories, where soulful connections are deep, yet for the most part remain unspoken.  With its focus on the subjective and emotional experience of the protagonists, where we sense something magical happening, allowing viewers to discover what is essential at any particular moment, for the director to show a sexually explicit relationship between a Hindu woman and a Muslim man in today’s India, under nationalist policies pushed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with a very significant increase in religious and political tensions (India's 'love jihad' laws: Another attempt to subjugate Muslims), makes this story as brave as it is beautiful.  India continues to be a place where women are punished for exercising their liberty.  These performances are genuine, feeling almost like a documentary, buttressed by the poetry of words and establishment shots that define where we are, where despite being far away, we feel as close as ever, offering clues to the transcendent power of cinema.  A tender, beautifully written and elegiac piece of work that has a seductive flow to it, with a slowly developing, hypnotic finale that feels right out of Wong Kar-wai’s CHUNGKING EXPRESS (1994), this understated film revels in human complexity and need, accentuating the fragility of existence, reminding us that grace can find its way through any darkness, with light becoming an apt metaphor for resilience and hope.

Cairo Station (Bab el Hadid)

 

Director Youssef Chahine

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CAIRO STATION (Bab el Hadid)                            A-                                                            aka: The Iron Gate                                                                                                                       Egypt  (77 mi)  1958  d: Youssef Chahine

This is Cairo Station, the heart of the capital.  Every minute one train departs and every minute another one arrives.  Thousands of people meet and bid farewell.  People from North and South, natives and foreigners, people with and without jobs.                                                —opening narration by Madbouli (Hassan el Baroudi)

Sparking controversy at the time of its release for its bleak portrayal of Egyptian society, exuding hostility, with Chahine claiming in an interview that they spat on his face on opening night (Youssef Chahine in Conversation with Tom Luddy on Notebook), causing such outrage that Egypt banned this film for over twenty years, yet it may be the director’s signature piece, exposing the social injustices in a fringe universe of exploited and impoverished workers who collectively form their own lower-end society among the larger surroundings of Cairo’s central railroad station.  The entire film takes place over the course of 24-hours in this claustrophobic setting, an oppressive reality shot by Alvise Orfanelli in striking black and white, sort of a combination of neo-realism and film noir, veering into a horror thriller, where even today it’s a hard film to categorize.  Few other films match this same level of bleak intensity, a grim and disturbing film dealing with human alienation, sexual repression, and social violence, where the railroad station becomes a microcosm of Arab society, full of constant motion, with trains simultaneously arriving and departing, accompanied by the everpresent bustle of passengers, from the ultra-chic to the everyday, ordinary, with unlicensed baggage porters frenetically vying against each other in an extremely competitive field, creating noticeable differences in social classes, even among the sub-strata of the poor confined to the station, yet it also has a melodramatic streak and a psycho-sexual turn foreshadowing Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), finding an even more demented anti-hero fringe character with shattered dreams who resembles the lead, becoming shockingly discomforting at times.  Chahine, himself, stars as a crippled, mentally unstable street vendor in one of Egypt’s earliest examples of a neo-realist film, a dramatic powerhouse that abandons the fantasy world of Egyptian studio films, namely the reliance on musical numbers, closed sets, and movie stars, and instead utilizes actual locations, with a brisk economic style that resembles the urgency of the French New Wave, though Chahine hasn’t abandoned the musical number entirely, still featuring a simply amazing comprehension for staging nothing less than an incredible musical sequence right in the middle of the most powerful, dramatic scenes.  The introductory narration comes from Madbouli (Hassan el Baroudi), an elderly owner of a kiosk inside the station who takes in Kenawi (Chahine) from a homeless street urchin, giving him a job selling newspapers, and even finding him an abandoned ramshackle shack to live which is also nestled inside the station.  Looking after him like a supportive father, Kenawi hops around on one good leg, wearing an old woolen cap, moving around between all the other activity, often an object of ridicule or derision, not ever taken seriously, ignored as an invisible presence unless he gets in somebody’s way, whereupon he’s kicked aside or beaten, as one might expect with a wayward dog on the loose.  Caught staring at a married woman, her husband gives him a thorough thrashing, blaming his own wife afterwards for not wearing a hijab headscarf.  As we follow him around back to his makeshift home, the walls are lined with magazine pin-up girls, revealing a deep-seeded sexual obsession burrowed under the surface.  Groups of women sell cold drinks, carrying ice buckets with them, scurrying around between the trains, often putting themselves in harm’s way to avoid arrest, where Hanouma (Hind Rostom) becomes a central figure, engaged to Abu Siri (Farid Shawqi), a burly porter who is attempting to unionize the workers to get out from under the exploitive and abusive control of Abu Gaber (Abdel Aziz Khalil).  Despite having knowledge of their impending marriage, Kenawi obsesses over Hanouma day and night, drawn to her vivacious and openly flirtatious personality, as she is everything he is not, sexually liberated, loud, and outgoing, following her around like a lap dog, as she enjoys the flattery and attention, often joking with him, but never once takes him seriously, and instead ends up laughing in his face following a marriage proposal, played out under the shadow of a Ramses statue, which sends him into emotional despair, his dreams of a better life outside the station completely shattered. 

This film marked a radical departure from Chahine’s earlier films, shot on location using a dizzying hand-held camera, relying more upon a meticulous visual design than the use of dialogue, employing crowd scenes and moving trains, where the grand architectural setting of the station tends to dwarf the people who use it every day, featuring people from all walks of life, from youth dancing outrageously to rock ‘n’ roll music to more tightly reserved religious men, from peasants to middle-class train passengers.  Those who are well off tend to travel through the station, only lingering temporarily, while for the poor this represents their everyday reality.  The groups never come together, as the transience of the station has them all moving in different directions.  Kenawi’s destabilized world finds protection in his little tin shack, which is a retreat from reality, observing everything around him, as he is the eyes and ears of the station, yet he is marginalized, ostracized by all social groups, but yearns for a better life outside the confines of the station.  What was initially viewed as negative depictions of the Egyptian poor later became a symbol of protest against the economic exploitation of the brutally harsh conditions among the working-class poor.  The initial casting against type startled audiences, as the well-known Egyptian movie stars were playing ordinary people who couldn’t be less glamorized.  Chahine, whose casting of himself in the film was highly unorthodox, gave himself third billing, though the story revolves around his character, as he had difficulties using other actors to play his on-screen persona, yet his portrayal of a cripple was so convincing that the Berlin Film Festival jury mistook him as a cripple.  His deeply sympathetic portrayal of a multi-dimensional character who was not only filthy and repulsive, yet physically deformed and mentally disturbed, with an engaging charm while in the presence of Hanouma, where it’s one of the film’s strongest attributes that he humanizes an outcast character most movie stars would refuse to play.  Chahine always viewed himself as an outsider, a bisexual, non-believing Christian in a predominately Muslim society, the child of an immigrant family, born to a Greek mother and a Lebanese father, and a product of the complex cosmopolitan culture of pre-War Alexandria.  Yet what is most remarkable is the integration of various movie genres, as it mixes social commentary with lighthearted comedy before delving into psycho-sexual horror.  It’s important to note the double standard of the police authorities, who pretty much allow the unlicensed male porters to fend for themselves in a Darwinian dog-eat-dog environment, refusing to intervene, while routinely chasing after the women to arrest them for illegally selling their drinks, earning a mere pittance, completely avoiding Mansour, the food and beverage profiteer who routinely sends the police after them for cutting into his business.  This plays into a portrait of an unjust society, accentuated by an ironic scene where a feminist orator from the Association of Women’s Rights with a loudspeaker at the station speaks about the abysmal working conditions for women in rural areas, where her words are largely ignored, as they can’t penetrate the lower-class stratosphere where these women reside.  Hanouma, for instance, largely accepts the everyday reality of women struggling to make a living in a man’s world, as they control all the purse strings, but that also leaves her subject to the antiquated patriarchal attitudes about keeping women in line, where they’re not even married yet but Abu Siri still regards her as his possession, giving her a thrashing whenever she disobeys his orders, conditions that seem all too commonplace.     

Easily the most audacious scene of the film takes place when a group of young people board a train, a tribute to the burgeoning international youth movement, as they’re carrying musical instruments and start playing rock ‘n’ roll music, played by members of Egypt’s first indigenous rock band, Mike and the Skyrockets, frolicking about, dancing wildly on the train, which draws the curiosity of Hanouma, who initially just stares at the wild gyrations of a female dancer before passing out drinks to everyone, eventually joining into the musical jubilation, with Kenawi’s face plastered to the train window, offering him a drink as well, instantly mimicking her dance movements, though he remains “outside” the train car, never really able to join in.  This scene of Western music in a strict Muslim society surely has an edge to it, and may have been viewed as blasphemous, but it adds a sense of elevated bravado to an otherwise downtrodden group, offering them a cinematic sense of liberation, even if short lived.  It’s a very forward-thinking decision, looking forward to that day when woman can enthusiastically express themselves with the same uninhibited vitality as men in a male-dominated Muslim society, though half a century later that day has yet to come.  Once Abu Siri gets a glimpse of her dancing jubilantly, he chases her into an abandoned warehouse and violently beats her, where she can be heard screaming with remorse, yet then she’s seen provocatively lying in a stack of hay, as if luring him on, changing the entire complexity of the moment with her sexual allure, concluding with a behind-the-scenes sexual union.  Abu Siri is established as a sexual predator, yet the scene confusingly blurs the lines between sex and violence.  Kenawi witnesses all this, yet we’re unsure how he’s processing it, as he never comes to her defense, with the machinations of his mind still agitated and infuriated from her earlier rejection.  There’s another sequence where the women think Hanouma is too full of herself, an exaggerated exhibitionist, so they splash water on her to cool her down, getting a giddy satisfaction out of a good-natured drenching as their own kind of payback, sending Hanouma into an empty train car sopping wet, with the male gaze of the camera finding the outlines of her underwear underneath the snug fit of her clothes against her skin.  After peeling off her dress, she stands in her soaking underwear, unaware that Kenawi is hiding nearby, watching her, staring at her exposed body, fixated on what he sees.  He is a voyeur, gazing at women who are unaware of his presence, so when she sees him in a mirror, she chases him away, ashamed and humiliated, and more than a little sexually frustrated, as Hanouma’s female friends throw stones at him.  Chahine also objectifies the deformed body of Kenawi with close-ups of his face and body, often accentuating the look in his eyes, a pained expression of repressed desires.  When Madbouli reads a newspaper article about a ghoulish crime where a knife-wielding serial killer cuts a woman’s body into pieces and places the parts in a suitcase, it sparks his own payback, planning his own devious attack against Hanouma.  His inability to possess his own object of desire leads to an urge to prevent anyone else from possessing her.  But in his own twisted mind and darkened state of confusion, he mistakenly kills Hanouma’s friend instead, stashing the body inside a crate containing Hanouma’s clothes, which she is transporting by train to the site of her anticipated wedding to Abu Siri.  Like Hitchcock’s Psycho, a gruesome stabbing is equated with sexual satisfaction, with Kenawi eventually hauled off in a straightjacket.  Another clever narrative device is opening and closing the film with an attractive young woman waiting for her boyfriend at the station, who arrives with a wife and children in tow, so it is an illicit affair, with the film closing with a shot of this same lovelorn woman on the train platform sadly waving goodbye, offering a contrast to the Chahine character, each bordering on the thin line between love and obsession.