lucky time Immersion, Urbanity And Fantasy In All We Imagine As Light

Payal Kapadia’s AWIAL is about two nurses – Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) from Kerala - and the Maharashtrian Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam). They are all migrants in Mumbai, working at the same hospital. Three men—Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon)lucky time, Anu’s Muslim lover; Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), Prabha’s suitor; an unnamed character (Anand Samy) whom Prabha resurrects from drowning—circulate through the corridors of mundane desiring that these women traverse. AWIAL etches this desire as thin lines on an urban canvas. The lines intersect to give us nodes of female bonding that mount small but believable challenges to patriarchal control, to the terror of realtors, or simply to the ignominy of loneliness. The film concludes hopefully with the affirmation of inter-religious love by the women.

Having seen the film twice, this viewer will concede that it is only too easy to slide oneself into the film and leave with a pleasant affection that is difficult to sort between tragedy and considered optimism. AWIAL’s immersive inducement is neither crafted out of engulfing spectacles, nor of the gripping pull of narrative compulsion. The ingenuity of the film lies instead in offering a rare opportunity to participate in the emotional lives of its characters more as a companion than as a consuming gaze.

Ranabir Das’ nonchalant camera does not indulge in strikingly composed images. Characters slide off the confines of the frame defying a well-defined mise en scène. The camera squints often in softening its focus. Without the alarming clarity and determinate artifactuality of contemporary images, we listen more carefully to the characters listening to each other against the soft tonal prods of the background score. More than obvious linear visual cues, an atmospheric soaking occupies our senses through the cold blueish hues of the tube light and tarpaulin. In the second half we encounter a grainy, over-exposed palette on which characters leak into their natural surroundings with luminous indistinction.

Kani Kusruti’s Prabha is also a significant part of this immersive inducement. She hesitates through a million gestures, just enough to compel the viewer’s empathy with her odd moral negotiation of a willfully missing husband, an eligible suitor, solidarity with a co-worker and Anu’s contraventions. Perhaps a film like AWIAL requires of us just this much - of befriending Anu and Prabha in their delightfully ordinary quest of life and longing.

Yet it would be unfair, at least to Kapadia’s craft, to ignore the sliver of disorientation that we experience between the two halves of the film. This is occasioned by the tussle between the urban realism of the film and the fantasy that it harbours in/for an other-worldly getaway. In reading this fantasy, there is scope to peel the layers of immersion that AWIAL offers, to be able to say something about the urban canvas on which the film draws its lines of desire and the mode of identification that animates its narrative.

As Malayali nurses, AWIAL’s protagonists hail from one of the most emblematic groups of migrant workers. Institutionalised care work has expanded over the years without formal social protection, with the global move away from stable industrial employment. In India, the devaluation of such care work possibly stems from a longer lineage of caste practice. Anu and Prabha bear this complicated lineage of gendered labour quite lightly, maybe even too lightly. The film mostly leads us past the material conditions of their profession to a wistful imagination of what it means to be the actually existing persona who add sentience to the rather unremarkably designated occupation of care work.

Divya Prabha’s charmingly playful Anu steals away time from the judgments of her co-workers to treat herself to the small pleasures of city life and warm bodies with Shiaz. Nonetheless, her desiring is a journey of interruptions. The reach of the family, communal control and even the disobedient monsoon—all come in the way of an otherwise liberating city life.

Prabha too is deftly urban in navigating the new linguistic, professional, and individualising demands that Mumbai makes of her, while also offering solidarity to the distressed Parvaty. But with the background of the estrangement of her husband, she is still not entirely at home in the city. Her dislocation is mainly reflected in the mirror of Anu’s more adventurous lifestyle, that Prabha has difficulty coming to terms with. As she narrates to Anu one night, her ‘arranged’ marriage was already to a stranger. Yet the arrival of a gift from her husband still leads her back to the unsettling longing, maybe for some kind of rooting to offset the uncertainties of urban life. Consequently, her relationship with Manoj must face denouement.

Parvaty’s case is of a very characteristic cheating by the city of the same migrant workers who sculpted Mumbai’s skeletal structures. Unlike Anu and Prabha, she is not composed of the depths of longing, more of a controlled frustration about being the casualty of the city’s de-industrial turn. She must leave Mumbai after losing her home to the aggression of real estate capital, now overwhelming the spaces of the erstwhile industrial working classes to fashion new avenues of surplus-making.

Curiously, the rather muted tragedy of Parvaty’s displacement also buys some crucial leisure time for Anu, Prabha and the narrative to move and think beyond the metropolis. Parvaty’s return to her village propels us into AWIAL’s second half, set in a coastal haven where Anu and Prabha rediscover their selves. But before that, as if betraying an awkward need to illustrate what it is trying to say, the film indulges in a documentary effect–voices of actual migrant workers tell us that you cannot be angry even if you live in the gutters of the city—this is ‘the Spirit of Mumbai.’ The irony was not lost on the viewer. But with this superfluous objectivity, one starts wondering, why it is so easy for us—citizens of the multiplex—to befriend the fictions of Prabha and Anu’s inner lives, while some others in the city register their presence as bare facts of urban alienation?

In the coastal village, Anu and Shiaz (who has followed her) find their way to a cave. The cave is hardly Plato’s prison of representation as they discover there the reality, that the risks of being in their socially complicated union are only possible to mitigate if they own up to their togetherness. Earlier, Anu had explained to Prabha that she cannot return to her own village and follow the diktats of her family even as Prabha cynically reminded her that she cannot escape her destiny. Outside the cave, blanketed by the shadows of leaves, Anu and Shiaz make love under the delicate watch of the camera, cementing their rebellious union in a different space and time, away from the lack of privacy in the city.

The multiple interruptions to Anu’s trajectory of longing in the first half mark a realist intersection of the social capaciousness of the city with the still limited material and moral affordances of urban life. In contrast, the resolution of sorts that she attains in the coast-side getaway seems to enact a new fantasy rather than fulfil an existing one. With a clear refusal to relocate to her rural origins, the determination to stay with the difficult medium of their inter-religious relationship is a bold political choice. But why is this clarity attainable only in this otherworldly space of natural amplitude, a space-time that is supposedly bereft of the moral gaze and material constraints that otherwise stretch across the rural into the urban?

BY Debanjan Dhar

The immaculate fantasy is more directly adopted in Prabha’s trajectory through a magic realist encounter with a man washed ashore, who stands in for her estranged husband in a beautiful, almost hallucinatory sequence of the film. She eventually refuses to let go of her present existence for an intransitive pursuit of desire. Prabha’s refusal echoes against a green landscape of cascading woods that marks a clear symbolic distinction against the intimacy of her human encounter. In the second half, the film thus resolutely replaces the social finitude of the urban built environment with a kind of radiant excess and natural unboundedness offering emotional lucidity. 

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At the end, Prabha and Anu both steadfastly refuse the social-moral compulsion stemming from their rural-communal pasts. It is then not difficult to qualify them as keenly urban subjects who, in a way, regroup their alienated selves as a new mutually enabling feminist community. Yet, the pursuit of this certainty outside urban settings raises questions. These questions also arise due to the sensorial disjunction whereby cold irony of urban lives comes into relief against a well-lit, warm, natural and near unpopulated elsewhere.

As M. Madhava Prasad’s work on Hindi cinema has shown, between 1950s-1970s, the city transitioned from being a narrative contrast to the nationalist championing of the values of the countryside to emerge as an independent space for the staging of social strife. Within this latter cinematic interest in urbanity, the rural became a more residual context lending some interiority to migrant, subaltern characters. With later films like Satya (1998), this role of the rural as the psychological pre-history of characters faded, as the urban subject emerged as driven by fantastic individual quests, often tending towards pathological outcomes.

BY Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee

AWIAL avoids this masculine pathological resolution to construct a subtle normalcy, where migrant subjects learn to live through their conditions of urban alienation rather than fall prey to them. Anu and Prabha are also potentially part of a line of cinematic women who reject an assimilation within a strictly national-communal order of cultural restitution. Yet, it is precisely because this rejection is only possible by keeping the city at an arm’s length, that we could be somewhat sceptical of the kind of emotional transcendence offered by the film.

Since the 2011 Census of India, rates of urbanisation are noticeably accelerating. Moreover, the ravaging of real estate capital and a spectacular but atomized media order borne of the internet seem to be exceeding the founding conditions of mass culture and municipal democracy to regenerate the urban without its modernist promise and beyond extant territorial clusters. Possible geographies of an-other space thus bear less potential of providing transcendence from urban anomie for most working populations. Rather, the fantasy of siting an alternative in such spaces and times inadvertently betrays a tourist-like middle-ness as undergirding the fantastic element of AWIAL, with the narrative alibi of exploring emotional depths of subaltern migrant lives.

BY Sonia Ghalian

In many ways, our immersion in the film’s soft embrace is also a sinking into this somewhat elastic social middleness. The film’s helpless attempts to ‘record’ the existence of real un-housed working classes, hoping not to stray too far away from their concerns, is telling of an anxiety about being ensconced in this rarefied ‘middle’. The equivalence attempted between Anu, Prabha and these documentary objects as urban subjects is only too easily lost in the protagonists’ pursuit of a transcendental resting place-time beyond the hustle and bustle of the city. With AWIAL, we peg our imagination of transcending urban alienation not so much to the warm ideology of a pastoral return or to the cynical wasteland of pathological devastation, as much to the fantasy of occasional rootlessness facilitated by post-industrial lifestyles and temporary getaways. The beach, the cave and the serene blanket of nature in the second half of AWIAL become a rather literal register for the desire for limited socio-temporal escapades stolen away from the post/de-industrial world of 24x7 work. To this viewer, this desire qualifies more as the aspiration of social middleness than as a medium for the cultivation of liberatory solidarities.

In conclusion, we are happy for Anu and Prabha’s tourism of heterotopias beyond the spatial limitations and rigid temporalities of the metropolis. But it is also difficult to disregard that this quest probably comes at the expense of too many familiar utopias and dystopias of popular culture. AWIAL would be remembered for the dull beauty that it makes of Mumbai. But in wandering away, the film eventually converges in a social ideology, as all films do.

Ritam Sengupta is Assistant Professor at the Jindal School of Art and Architecturelucky time, O.P. Jindal Global University.