An Aesthetics of Tenderness

On Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light

• In just two weeks, on January 18 and 25, I’m offering an online seminar on writing sex. Over two two-hour sessions (recorded for those who can’t attend synchronously), we’ll consider great sex writing by DH Lawrence, Philip Roth, James Baldwin, Miranda July, Raven Leilani, and others, and think about how they use sex to further character, conflict, theme. (An earlier iteration of this class was called “What Sex Can Do”; the answer turns out to be: pretty much everything.) I’d love to have you join us. Full info and registration here.

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So far as new films are concerned, the second half of 2024 was a season of disappointments. Maybe it’s that the first half offered such marvels: one of the first films I saw last winter was Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest. (I wrote about it back in February.) But then, after Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (which I also wrote about for this newsletter; and I liked her first film, Corpo celeste, even more), what seemed to me really great? I loved a couple of things with lesser ambitions, at least as I measured them (especially Humanist Vampire, the most charming film of the year), but films that seemed to me to be swinging for the fences mostly fell short. I saw a lot of movies that broke into unequal halves. Evil Does Not Exist, wonderful for the first hour or so, became to my mind absurd in its final movements. Anora had the opposite problem; its excellent second half was undone by the absurdity of its premise. Who could believe that the fantastically smart protagonist (beautifully played by Mickey Madison) would fall for the ridiculous teenage nonentity (ludicrously bad at sex, constantly high, his only ambition video games) who pays her for companionship—that, more absurdly still, she would be so naïve as to believe their Las Vegas shotgun marriage might actually hold up in the face of his oligarch family’s objections? For the first half of Seed of the Sacred Fig, the incredibly brave film by Mohammad Rasoulof, which you should absolutely see if you haven’t, I felt like I was watching a sublime masterpiece, featuring the single most powerful scene I saw all year. The second half didn’t just make an unfortunate shift of genres and aesthetics; by revealing the father to have been, all along, not the tortured functionary we met in the film’s opening movements but a fanatic psychopath, it betrays the very dynamic that made the first half great. About several other films I saw, like Luca Guadagnino’s take on William Burroughs’s Queer, or the musicals The End and the much-fêted Emilia Pérez—well, the less said the better. (Emilia Pérez is at least interesting, and features good performances from its leads; and I was glad I didn’t walk out of Queer, as I had been tempted to: the last thirty minutes are the strongest.)

This string of bad luck broke, finally, a couple of weeks ago, when a friend and I went to see the first fiction feature from Payal Kapadia, All We Imagine as Light. Along with the Glazer, it’s the best thing I saw all year. I was so moved by it I went again the next day; I saw it a third time last week, in Iowa City. The film has made a splash: it won the Grand Prix at Cannes, the first Indian film to do so; and it’s up for two Golden Globes, for foreign-language film and, excitingly, Best Director. Obama included it on his yearly list of favorites. Surely the film (and Kapadia) will show up on the Oscar lists as well, in a couple of weeks—but not for foreign film, since the French committee selected Emilia Pérez instead (wrong!) and the Indian committee (thirteen members strong and all of them male, Kapadia has observed) rejected it as “a European film taking place in India, not an Indian film taking place in India.” That’s a statement that could use some unpacking. Later, the head of the committee added that “The jury felt that her film was very poor technically,” which made me think of a very helpful thing Frank Bidart said to me decades ago: “Once someone has said something that stupid, you never have to listen to them again.”

Kapadia’s first film, A Night of Knowing Nothing, was a highly stylized and “poetic” documentary, interposing a found cache of unsent letters documenting a hopeless love with an account of student protests against the Modi government, which were met with brutal repression. It too made a splash—it won the 2021 L’Oeil d’or for Best Documentary at Cannes—but it feels like a student film to me, too long and honestly in my experience a little bit boring. (It’s streaming on Amazon, you can see what you think.) All We Imagine as Light is never for one instant boring. But Kapadia’s documentary work stands her in good stead as she turns to fiction, incorporated into a much more successful, much more convincingly poetic texture than she achieved in the earlier film.

At just under two hours, Light isn’t particularly long, but it’s capacious, and hard to summarize in a sentence or two. One way in is to think of it as a portrait of Mumbai—as profound a filmed portrait of a city as I’ve seen. (I thought more than once, though it’s a very different film, of Fellini’s Roma.) Twice in the film—in the opening sequence, and again about half way through—we’re offered documentary-style footage of the city. In the first minutes this consists of nighttime or early morning scenes of roadside markets, then of what seems to be a rush-hour commute; in the later sequence we see a festival, the streets full of dancers, sky lit with fireworks. Accompanying these images is a series of voiceovers from unidentified speakers who otherwise have no role in the film. They speak about the city, sometimes in strikingly philosophical tones. The first impression the film gives is one of diversity, heterogeneity, as subtitles helpfully identify the city’s many languages: Bhojpuri, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali; we also hear Hindi and, in snatches, English. (These languages aren’t always identified, and watching the film I feel that a whole world of meaning—of class, power, code-switching—is lost to me thanks to my inability to distinguish them.) Mumbai as the film presents it is a city of immigrants; everyone we meet has lives divided between city and village. The first voice we hear says that after twenty-three years he is still afraid to call the city home. “The city takes time away from you,” another voice says. In the later sequence Mumbai is called both a city of dreams and a city of illusions; “you have to believe the illusion,” a voice says in Tamil, “otherwise you’ll go mad.”¹

After the opening montage, the camera settles on a single woman, standing on a tram, holding on to a metal pole. (So much of the film takes place on transit, people going to or from work; another impression the film gives is of the distances the city contains.) This is Prabha (Kani Kusruti), one of the three women at the film’s center. All three work at the same hospital, where Prabha is head nurse and her much younger roommate, Anu (Divya Prabha), is a fairly recent hire. Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), older than the other two women, works as a cook. Three generations of women: another composite portrait. But they’re also individuals, and the film patiently establishes their spheres of concern. Prabha, still youthful in middle age, grieves for her husband, whom she barely got to know before he left for a factory job in Germany; for a year he hasn’t called her, and when, in a devastating scene late in the film’s first half, she finally tries to call him, she discovers that his number has been disconnected. Anu, whose parents keep sending her photos of potential husbands, is in love with Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), a Muslim boy she knows her family will never accept; their putatively secret meetings are already causing a minor scandal in the hospital. And Parvaty is being forced out of the home she has lived in for twenty-two years; it’s being demolished to make room for a new luxury high-rise, part of the city’s rapid gentrification. Her attempts to fight this will fail, because, in the wake of her husband’s death, she lacks the proper papers to establish her residency.

The women aren’t equally treated, the film establishes a hierarchy of concern: Prabha gets the greatest share of our attention, Parvaty the least. One of the pleasures of the film is how their spheres of concern are managed, kept distinct then brought into contact, in a shifting narrative geometry. But we care for them all, in large part because we see them care for each other. Care is finally the movie’s central concern. There’s the hospital, of course, with its professional care; but also we see Prabha help Parvaty in her attempt to keep her home, and help Anu, who’s always short of cash when the rent is due; Parvaty counsels Prabha about her absent husband; when, about half-way through the movie, Parvaty gives up the fight and decides to return to her very beautiful seaside village, Anu and Prabha will help her make the move. Even Anu and Prabha’s pregnant cat receives an exceptional kind of care, when they take her to the hospital for an ultrasound, administered by Dr. Manoj, who is smitten with Prabha.

All this care gives the film its overwhelming affect of tenderness. I’m not sure I’ve seen another film that so embodies tenderness, that’s so lavish in its distribution. It’s as if Kapadia refuses to think of tenderness, of the tenderness of our attention, as a finite resource. Often as I watched I thought of Bishop’s line, from “Filling Station”: “Somebody loves us all”; one feels that the film itself becomes the loving intelligence posited in that line. Even background figures are individuated, even masses of human bodies remain human. There’s a wonderful brief scene where we see Prabha, who has finally accepted the other nurses’ invitation to go out with them, sitting in a movie theater. She’s among women we’ve only seen glancingly to this point, and I was struck by how carefully the scene is composed and directed, how equalizing Kapadia’s choices are: each woman’s face conveys an individual experience; in the way certain bodies are drawn toward others (one woman grips another’s arm), we even get a sense of the relationships among them. Why is this so powerful? In scenes like this one, or in others of mass transit, of a packed, sweltering medical waiting room, as the camera alights on one individual face after another, we constantly, unavoidably feel the reality of stories that aren’t this film’s story. Those stories are excluded by the film’s frame, by the stories—of Prabha, Anu, Parvaty—it has chosen to tell. But the film makes us acknowledge those excluded stories, it makes us feel that they are real. These are lives too, I felt the film to be saying, just as interesting, just as valuable, as the lives of these three women, as your own lives.

This isn’t a message the film conveys, but a value it embodies—embodies not via exposition but through image. There are relatively few extended scenes (those there are are important); instead, the film is largely made up of scenic fragments, brief glimpses, nonnarrative montages, all fitted together in a kind of mosaic structure. This works because Kapadia charges images and gestures with extraordinary significance. Two examples. Early in the film, we follow Anu as she leaves the hospital, winding her way through crowded sidewalks and streets. We know that she’s headed to a meeting with Shiaz; she has asked him to wait for her some distance from the hospital, so as not to attract attention.

(A breath here to say just quickly that the film’s treatment of text and voice messages felt to me like a real innovation, a solution to a problem. Very often films treat texting with a kind of dreary literalism: we see someone bent over their phone, thumbs flying; or, worse, we watch as words unfurl on a screen. The first season of Heartstopper, which I know many of you loved, and which is, alas, terrible, something someday maybe I will write a long essay about, consisted largely of interminable scenes of this sort. Death. We only see Anu thumb typing once or twice, and only briefly; otherwise Kapadia takes a refreshingly varied approach to making these exchanges—which do, after all, make up much of the texture of our days—dramatic. Sometimes we hear a voiceover against various montages (city scenes, clouds); sometimes the text of the messages appears over images of the characters going about more interesting business. (Or, in an early scene with Anu, being delightfully bored at work.) There’s sometimes a special delight in these texts for an English speaker, as when Anu, whom we watch buying a burqa so she can sneak into Shiaz’s neighborhood, says (in the English subtitles) that she “feels like a spy”—which loses something of the original, in which the English words “full spy vibe” are tucked among the Malayalam.)

Anyway, in one of the shots of Anu walking, there’s a young man behind her whom you don’t really notice on first viewing; a moment later, in a wonderful aerial shot, we see Anu come to a stop at a crosswalk just as this young man, Shiaz, steps up behind her and, wordlessly, seamlessly, slips his hand into hers. They both light up at the contact, subtly, without any obvious change in their comportment. It’s a classic romantic image; it also conveys, in a flash, the whole relationship between these two characters: its furtiveness, its familiarity, the joy they take in each other.

Or consider the amazing use the film makes of an ultra-modern, bright red, really very beautiful rice cooker, which arrives at Anu and Prabha’s apartment very early in the film, in a mysterious package addressed to Prabha. It’s even nicer than the one my parents have at home, Anu says, wondering who could have sent it as she turns it around in her hands, looking for clues, and as Prabha steps very slightly back, her face falling. English letters, Anu says finally, but it’s not English; finally she reads Made in Germany. Isn’t that where your husband is, she asks Prabha, who doesn’t answer.

We see the cooker two more times. The first is just a glimpse—I don’t think I noticed until my second viewing—of it sitting unremarked on the counter, tucked out of the way. The second is one of the film’s key moments. It’s night (we see Anu soundly sleeping), and the kitchen window has come unlatched in a storm. (Rain—astonishing, sudden, torrential rain—and the accommodations made to rain, are among the film’s constant preoccupations.) Prabha pulls the pane closed, then squats to clean the water that has blown in. She drags a bunched towel through the puddle, then wrings it out into a bucket. Something catches her eye, and she leans forward to pull out the rice cooker, which has been hidden away on a low shelf. It has clearly never been used. She pulls it toward her, letting herself shift backward to sit on the wet floor.

Prabha, though she occupies the center of the film, granted more screen time than any other character, is more reticent than Anu or Parvaty. She gives a sense of sharply guarded containment; she’s closed off. We don’t have access to her inner life in the way we do Anu’s, who is so voluble with her feelings, whose interiority spills out in text messages and romantic declarations, in adolescent giddiness and gloom—not to mention the moment, unique in the film, when, bored and playing with a stethoscope, we hear her literal interiority, her breathing and heartbeat, as she hears it: her point of view, her sensorium becomes ours.

We never have a moment like that with Prabha, something in her remains off-limits, inviolate.² Kapadia, in a way that seems to me masterful, makes this containment eloquent, more than eloquent, plangent. Prabha drags the rice cooker across the floor, pulls it between her splayed knees, and wraps her arms around it. It’s a small scene—less a scene than an image, or a gesture; it can’t last more than a minute or two. But it registers as a crucial event, a revelation. It’s Prabha’s most vulnerable moment, played gorgeously by Kani Kusruti; and it crucially prepares us for the film’s emotional climax. (It’s worth saying that all of the film’s performances are wonderful; there isn’t a false note from anyone.)

Many of these resonant images serve no real narrative or characterological purpose. Some seem to serve no apparent purpose beyond beauty: clouds moving across a sky, say. More often, they deepen our sense of Mumbai: women running across a rooftop to snatch laundry from a line; a train, seen through a window at night, carving a lit line through the dark; boys playing soccer in a field of mud. And then, having luxuriated in this way in the city’s beauty, the movie leaves it behind. The second half (more or less) of the film takes place in Parvaty’s village, where all three women will find resolutions, at least of a kind, to the spheres of concern established in the first half of the film.

“Spheres of concern” is an awkward phrase, I know; I’m using it to avoid the usual language about “conflict,” which somehow feels inappropriate to the film. “Nothing really bad happens,” my friend said after we watched the movie for the first time, but that isn’t true: some very bad things happen, like Parvaty losing her home of decades, or Prabha realizing that her husband is almost certainly not coming back, or not to her—that the rice cooker was meant as consolation for a lonely future. ( “We’re the same, we’re better off alone,” Parvaty says to her; Prabha will turn down Dr. Manoj’s sweet advances.) Or Anu’s conviction that her family will reject Shiaz. But it’s true that the film sees the women through these losses with extraordinary gentleness; there are no dramatic showdowns, no abrupt slamming of narrative doors.

Instead, the resolutions are gentle. Anu and Prabha help settle Parvaty in her family home, which Parvaty and Anu will bless with a silly dance, taking swigs from a dusty bottle of alcohol. More elaborately, Anu has arranged for Shiaz to follow her to Parvaty’s village, and the two of them will finally find, in the surrounding forest, the privacy they’ve sought in vain in the city. This resolution happens in two movements: first, in a scene that made me think of Roma, they explore a grotto or cave where they read contemporary lovers’ graffiti scrawled over ancient carvings. (Shiaz surprises Anu with his own addition: Our love is like the endless sea.) After this, they finally, I think we’re meant to understand for the first time, have sex.

I saw some truly terrible sex scenes at the movies this past year; the one in Light is pretty much ideal, as compelling as—if very different from—the ferocious sex scenes in Ira Sachs’s Passages. Something I admire throughout Kapadia’s film is her candor in treating bodies. Prabha sweats throughout the movie, often wiping her brow or lip with a handkerchief; we see an entirely unsensationalized flash of breast as Anu changes; there’s a wonderful, casual shot of Prabha squatting to piss in the forest. (I was reminded of a similar scene, in an abandoned Italian village, in Corpo celeste.) All of this is part of the film’s commitment to realism, about which more in a bit.

In the sex scene between Anu and Shiaz, this candor is applied to the male body. Throughout the film, Anu is presented as the more experienced, the more adventurous lover. (“Why are you asking like a virgin,” she says when Shiaz expresses concern at the idea of her seeing naked men in her work as a nurse; she will laugh at his timidity as they look for places to make out in the city.) It’s clear that she is directing things when they finally make love, lying on the ground outside the grotto. But she doesn’t undress, at least not fully. Instead it’s Shiaz who is naked, and his body the camera frames in a close-up tracking shot, moving with Anu’s hand as it first fondles his nipple, then slides down to his crotch. It’s an undemonstrative but assertive gesture on the part of the film, marking the man as the object of desire. I don’t mean to make this seem willed, or somehow ideological. It’s a consequence of the intimacy of the scene, of our intimacy with Anu; and it deepens our sense of the couple’s joy. After sex, they laugh together. It’s beautiful, delicate, entirely convincing.

I thought a lot about realism as I watched All We Imagine as Light—about what it is, where its borders are and how artificial they might be; about how devotion to realism might license ventures into something beyond realism. About how the very pressure of that devotion to realism might allow a scene to flip into the surreal, if we can mean by that a realism so heightened (sur-réel) it transgresses what we usually think of as the limits of the real. The climax of Kapadia’s film comes in the aftermath of the loudest, the most dramatic event of the film, when a man is found unconscious, apparently drowned, on the beach. (When we see him, he seems to be wrapped in netting, perhaps suggesting that some fishermen have dragged him ashore; the film doesn’t worry about these logistics.) Prabha is sitting at a little cantina on the beach; alerted by shouts from the water’s edge, she runs to help. For all her reserve, she quickly asserts authority; the men surrounding the drowned man step back. The man is unknown, he isn’t a local—“he’s not one of ours,” one voice says. Prabha kneels, checks for a pulse, performs CPR, revives him; the gathered crowd applauds. At Prabha’s direction, they carry the man to the village doctor.

What follows is the most beautiful scene in this very beautiful film. We never see the village doctor, only his assistant: a very old woman who speaks Marathi, a language of which Prabha seems to have only a rudimentary grasp. This woman calls Prabha into the shack where the man, still unconscious, has been laid out on what seems to be a table. Night has fallen; there’s a single, naked bulb above him. Various fabrics hang over openings in the structure; the old woman will try to arrange them to keep out the wind. Left alone with the man, Prabha, as if instinctively, begins acting as a nurse: she takes a wet cloth and begins cleaning him, then tries to treat a wound along his side. (A close shot of Prabhu’s hand as she does this recalls the scene between Anu and Shiaz.) The man wakes and catches her hand, saying it hurts. He speaks to her in her own language.

I tried, my second and third times watching the film, to track how this extravagant, subtle scene works. I haven’t figured it out; every choice seems important. Somehow, the room Prabha and the man are in becomes a world apart. I think sound is crucial to how this happens. In my memory, there’s a sound of something like chimes, metal objects moving in the wind; and we hear the wind itself, and the movement of the ocean, not far off. Very faintly, barely audible, there’s music. There’s a whole essay to be written about music in the film, both diegetic and non-diegetic; what comes now is music of a kind we haven’t heard before. It’s played on an instrument I didn’t recognize, pitched and percussive, something like a zither or dulcimer. It grows louder when the woman enters, perhaps coming from a radio she’s carrying. (If so, we never see it.) The woman speaks to Prabha, who she assumes is married to the man; she ignores or doesn’t understand Prabha’s denials. “Where does your husband work,” the woman asks; Prabha, giving up her attempts to make her understand, says Germany. What a pity your holidays were ruined, the woman goes on; but also: he’s lucky you were here.

When the old woman steps out of the room, leaving them alone, the man asks Prabha what she was saying. She thinks you’re my husband, Prabha says, to which the man, magically, perfectly, responds: “Am I?” Kapadia shoots the scene in such a way that the bare bulb, garishly bright, distorts the image; this too adds to the sense that slowly, step by step, the film has brought us into a different world. (Another essay that surely someone will write: the film’s gorgeous, virtuosic use of night photography.) Why is there sand on me, the man asks. He doesn’t remember what has happened to him; perhaps he doesn’t remember who he is. And within this blankness of his not-remembering, the space it opens up, he becomes Prabha’s absent husband. You’ve changed so much in all these years, he says. He speaks of his long hours in the factory, of days without sunlight—“in the darkness you try to imagine the light but you cannot,” he says; he says he thought of her. “Why haven’t you told me this before,” Prabha asks him; in response he asks her, using her name, which she hasn’t told him—we’ve entirely entered fantasy now—to come with him. It will be different this time, he says, taking her hand, then kissing her palm, placing seven kisses up her hand and wrist. We see her face; she’s weeping. Then we cut to an image of hills, a forest shrouded in mist, as we hear Prabha’s voice. “Stop,” she says. And then: “I don’t want to see you ever again.”

What a risk this scene is; I’m sure there are some viewers for whom it doesn’t work. I was utterly convinced, utterly ravished. Again, the film’s tenderness: in a situation in which resolution isn’t possible—Prabha’s husband has slipped beyond her reach, unavailable for anything that might offer “closure”—the film finds a way, magically, to grant resolution. At least a provisional resolution. The film’s final scene takes place on the beach again, late at night, back at that cantina, where a teenage attendant is listening to music while closing up for the night—though she³ tells Parvaty she can stay at her table as long as she likes. Prabha is at the water’s edge, looking out; from her face we can see that something has changed, that the sadness that has weighed on her through the whole film has lifted. When Anu steps up beside her, Prabha asks, “Where is that boy”—the first acknowledgment that she knows about Shiaz, whom she glimpsed with Anu earlier in the woods. “I’m sorry,” Anu says, but Prabha dismisses this; she tells Anu, to Anu’s amazement, to call him. A little later, Anu will lead Shiaz to the table where the other women sit. Where are you from, Prabha will ask Shiaz, and then she tells him that she has been to his village once. “It’s very beautiful there,” she says. “It’s very beautiful here, too.”

And that’s how the film ends, with the four of them sitting at a table, in Parvaty’s village, Anu and Shiaz nervous but also basking in being seen for the first time as a couple. The film closes on a long, distant shot of the four of them, behind them the cantina with its strings of lights, the teenager dancing—at first subtly, then more exuberantly—as she listens to her Walkman, above them the night sky full of stars. A tenderness that accommodates grandeur—and also, as I said earlier, provisionality. The film leaves these characters in what has become an idyll, a place where their conflicts can be resolved, or can seem to be resolved. In fact, the troubles still remain: Parvaty will have to figure out how to live in the village, where opportunities are few; we know that she has been promised a job in a hostel, but Prabha worries about how she will manage. And Prabha and Anu will have to return to Mumbai, to the pressures of their real lives. Anu’s parents will still push her to marry a man they deem appropriate; a future with Shiaz is still unimaginable. This gives the happiness with which the film ends a painful melancholy.

Amazing that the film gets to have it both ways. The real world waits, with all its conflict and loss. But that’s not all of reality, the film seems to say; existence also allows for fullness, for restitution; let this moment be real, too.

As always, thank you for reading—

G.

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1. I’m aware it’s annoying that sometimes I present dialogue with quotation marks, sometimes without. All dialogue comes from notes scribbled into my little Moleskin in the dark of the movie theater. Quotation marks indicate greater confidence that I’m presenting an actual quotation, as opposed to a paraphrase. But please consider all dialogue approximate.

2. Maybe this isn’t quite true: there’s one moment that comes close. It comes in the scene with that quick glimpse of the rice cooker, when Prabha reads a poem that Dr. Manoj has given her. (Wonderfully, surprisingly, since Manoj seems so hapless in scene, the poem is quite good—another form of the tenderness the film extends toward its characters.) We read the poem with Prabha—but it doesn’t quite feel as pure a representation of interiority as this earlier scene with Anu, maybe because the voice that reads the text is Dr. Manoj’s.

3. I’m not sure what to make of the fact that this character—who gets a fascinating kind of attention in the final scenes of the film, almost becoming a fourth POV—is unique in the film for her androgynous presentation. To several friends who have seen the film this figure (played by Saee Abhay Limaye) has read as male; and in the credits the character is identified without gender: “Teenager at the shack.”