Payal Kapadia’s listless working class

The film is testimony to how creative artistes regard working class lives — neither relatable nor grotesque enough to stir the imagination, writes M K Raghavendra

There have not been many representations of the working class in Indian cinema although portrayals of the marginalised — Dalits, tribals and slum dwellers — are common in art cinema. By ‘working class’, I mean people engaged in blue-collar work. The reason may be India’s hierarchical fixations that frown upon physical labour. In fact many of India’s artisanal skills have been lost because children have, rather than follow their family vocations, obtained doubtful degrees to make them fit into clerical jobs because these are more ‘respected’.

Hollywood exults in showing people practicing their skills and even blockbusters like Jaws (1975) lavished attention on how physical work is done. Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, which deals with three migrant women workers in Mumbai, is obviously an exception. 

Kapadia’s film has attracted attention at Cannes but we need to examine it without the burden of the award to understand its discourse. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) are Malayali nurses sharing a flat in Mumbai. Prabha is married to a man who migrated to Germany soon after their marriage and he rarely gets in touch. Anu is in a secret relationship with Shiaz, a Muslim man. Manoj, a young doctor, is interested in Prabha but she is too acutely conscious of being married. Parvaty (Chaya Kadam) is a Marathi-speaking cook at the same hospital and she is being evicted from her chawl by a builder.

But the first aspect of the film that strikes one is its listlessness. One associates it initially with the film’s production values until one recognises that there is nothing dramatic in it that might have involved us. Critics see it as warm but does it even draw us into empathy? With ‘sympathy’ we only feel for someone’s problems but with ‘empathy’ we feel their emotions by identifying with them.

To identify with characters, their lives must have dramatic value and it is not necessary for their lives to be like ours. One can identify with Ricci and his family in ‘Bicycle Thieves’ even if the loss of a bicycle does not seem great, personally. It is because we are led through emotion after emotion during Ricci’s search for the bicycle that we identify with him since there is something ‘human’ in us that goes beyond the personal. 

All lives can be made exciting and to portray the lives of the three women as drab — as the film does — is condescension. Parvaty has believed that the space she was living in was her own and Kapadia does not make her even try to save it. There is potential for excitement in her exertions but Parvaty gives up too easily. When Prabha finds Manoj, a doctor, attracted to her, she offers no response and it simply seems that the director is not interested since she has not even tried to portray the two as the subjects of a romance. A nurse will certainly also have aspirations but Prabha only goes through everyday emotions. The highpoint is her receiving a pressure cooker from Germany. 

Anu in a relationship with a Muslim, being also a potential political hazard, offers other possibilities for drama but the level of detail in the relationship is small. To make the people interesting as characters in fiction they must make hard choices that lead to repercussions and none are in evidence. The problem is perhaps that Kapadia in choosing her protagonists is not interested enough in lives like theirs. The camera following people does not itself spell ‘involvement’ if the storyteller cannot construct dramatic stories, with trajectories leading us to anticipate. 

The film concludes with the two nurses going with Parvaty to her seaside village and Prabha saving a man’s life. He is taken for her husband and that she briefly imagines him thus but it does not come to very much. Shiaz — who has been kept secret from the others — now comes to the spot, and he is accepted. This is to offer some resolution to the drabbest of lives; but it is the director’s incapacity to find drama that makes the lives drab, not their intrinsic natures. 

It is unfortunate that the class which is creative is not the class with social experience of the kind that artistes in film try to explore. The lives of the truly marginalised like sanitary workers are seen as horrific rather than drab and that gets the filmmakers’ imagination going. But the lives of ordinary workers do not awaken productive emotions and cinema has paid little attention to them. Payal Kapadia’s film is testimony to how creative artistes regard working class lives — neither as something that one might identify with nor as something grotesque enough to stir one’s imagination. 

(The author is a well-known film critic)