(Second Part)
(Woven with stunningly cinematic audio-visual language, this Film what oscillates between tenderness and raw intensity, calls for a neo form of criticism that can resonate with its visuo-poetic complexity.)
Thematic Exploration of the Film: Love, Metaphysics and Beyond :
Payal Kapadia’s ‘All We Imagine as Light’ is not just a story of women navigating urban loneliness and personal longing- it is a deep metaphysical meditation on ‘Love’. The film explores love not merely as a romantic or social construct but as an ontological state, a force that exists between absence and presence, between the known and the unknowable. In its quiet, poetic frames, the film asks: Is love bound to time, space, and the body? Or is it something more ephemeral, something imagined, like light? Kapadia presents love not as a simple emotion but as a metaphysical condition – an experience that transcends individual desire and dissolves into something universal. Throughout the film, love is often depicted through what is missing rather than what is present. In a western philosophical perspectives, the theme echoes Plato’s theory of ideal forms -the idea that true love, like perfect beauty or truth, exists in a higher, abstract realm but is never fully realized in our physical world. Prabha loves an idea, of an abstract of something or someone not a tangible presence. On the other hand Anu, in contrast, represents love as a bodily impulse, a desire tied to the physical world. If Prabha’s love is abstract and spectral, Anu’s love is earthly, flesh-bound, and urgently desirous. The third protagonists Parvati illustrates a synchronous balance with a flow of liberty and free spirit.
Philosopher and eminent Scholar Slavoz Žižek in a famous quote said “Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give you what you desire – it tells you how to desire.” And it can be said that Payal’s this work of creation is deeply introspective : on ‘desiring’ and ‘desired’ where almost every frame is a visual trapestry on loneliness, attributes, urban alienation, and fleeting moments of transcendence. Here Light unfolds like a slow-moving painting, where each frame is a carefully composed like the brushstrokes of cinematograph, layered with textures of emotion, space, and silence. The film is not just seen; it is felt, like a canvas where light and shadow shape inner worlds, where the glances of human longing emerged through movement, color, and sound.
On the context of Metaphysics, the film can be read with an Eastern Philosophical spectacle also such of Metaphysical duality of Love: Mirroring the Upanishadic discourse of in between the transient Illusion (‘Maya’) and the eternal eternity (‘Brahman’). Is love a fleeting illusion (Maya) – a biological drive, a temporary fulfillment of desire? Or is it something that transcends the body, a deeper cosmic connection of consciousness (Brahman)? Kapadia like a True Artist, perhaps suggests that the love is always caught between these two realms- with an intermittent tension of unconscious drive as it is at once bodily and eternal, material and metaphysical.
Theme of Mind and Mechanism:
In her interviews and talks, Payal Kapadia often mentions about her supreme interest towards ‘Human Behaviour’ as central theme, she refers “why we behave the way we do?”. This film is steeped in psychological depth of exploring that behavioral patterns with psychoanalytic undercurrents, exploring themes of love, longing, displacement, and repressed desire. From a Freudian perspective, the film intricately portrays repression, displacement, and unfulfilled desires through the lives of its three protagonists- Prabha, Anu, and Parvaty. Each of these women carries unresolved conflicts that shape their subjectivity, relationships, and emotional turbulence.
Prabha’s marriage exists in absence rather than presence-her husband, has become a phantom figure, disappearing into a foreign land. The unexpected arrival of a rice cooker (the pivotal scene of cuddling the cooker) from Germany acts as a trigger for the return of the repressed-memories of abandonment, unresolved grief, and the unspoken emotions she has buried beneath routine. The Freudian pleasure principle and reality principle are at constant odds in Anu’s life too. While her unconscious seeks fulfillment in love, the external world demands suppression, forcing her to navigate the fragile border between passion and societal constraint. Parvaty’s decision to return to her ancestral village can be seen as a form of regression- a return to an imagined past where stability and community existed before urban alienation took hold. From a Jungian (Carl Jung) standpoint, the urban theme mirrors the collective unconscious of city landscape as an extension of the psyche, housing millions of isolated souls, all unknowingly sharing the same existential struggle. The darkness, dim and artificial lights contrast the ego’s control and the shadow self of diverse suppressed emotions and desires of the living inhabitants.
Finally Kapadia’s film is a testament to the power of observational cinema which many of its essence cannot be verbalized or written but to be felt inside only. Every frame is meticulously composed, emphasizing texture, light, and movement. With her dynamically brilliant team (Special Mention to Ranabir Das for the outstanding splashes in cinematography, Topse for his Music along with having Ethiopian composer nun Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’s magical tune), Payal Kapadia flashed the Real Light in Indian Independent Cinema (Even the production of the film of having multi-nations’ micro finances assistance itself a great symbolic venture) by making this film in this overall clinically turmoil time of the country and the world. In one of the sequences at the middle of the film during a diverse imageries perturbed by Ganapati Celebration in Mumbai, many linguistic threads come and decipher the city of Mumbai and finally a soliloquacious voice in Malayalam proclaims something what was versed almost in same reverberation long time ago by FrenchModernist Poet Charles Baudelaire. It gets intensified with screen framed dances and crackers illumined: “You have to believe in illusion, otherwise you get mad .” Before going to the theatre I was having my own effusion of thoughts that I might be drowning into suffering catharsis after seeing the film, on a contrary it gave me the Joyous Light. A true insightful Light.
My Salutation to You, Payal Kapadia !
(Arijit Ray, an Independent Scholar & Faculty and an Ardent Cinephile. Santiniketan, West Bengal/ Bodhgaya, Bihar)
(Image Courtesy : Film’s official Poster)
(The article is solely the opinion of the author. The views expressed here are solely personal and not in any way connected to any organisation or any political party.)
