The Laapataa Ladies Of All We Imagine As Light

“HOW CAN YOU MARRY SOMEONE YOU DON'T KNOW?”, Anu, a sprightly young nurse seeking love and privacy in an overstuffed city asks Prabha, her older, cautious friend and roommate. Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light hums like a lightly struck chord, but every now and then it bellows from the depths of its cold, hollow interiors. In comparison, Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies trades the awkwardness of companionship for the bemusement of its urgency. For Phool, there is no soil to walk back to from that ledge of marital fantasy. Marriage feels like an ebb from where the rest of life begins. You are either in love or convinced by the idea of it. Both films wrestle with ideas of womanhood, love and longing. The language and the visual vocabulary differ, but in one’s evenness, you can find the playful disorder of the other.

Laapataa Ladies and All We Imagine as Light have been locked all year, in a tight-lipped but ultimately dignified battle for the right to represent India at the Oscars. Both differ in eras, demography and anxieties, and yet both speak of a common foundational whim; what if women could reach out and pluck the star they spend their lifetimes staring at? No matter what constellation of ideology it belongs to. To Phool (Nitanshi Goel), for example, her marriage isn’t just a means to an end, but an end in itself. A glorious, uplifting, warm end that’ll last her for the rest of her life. Of course, it helps that her would-be husband is as almost delicate and naïve as her. Sometimes you don’t need a guiding light but someone equally lost, willing to scour the darkness of the world with you.

For Prabha, played with exquisite, wide-eyed depth by Kani Kasruti, marriage is this abstract contract between the vagaries of belonging and the vacuum of presence. Much like Phool, her partner is out of sight, but never quite out of mind; as this invisible, electric knot around the wrist that wants to poke the world. It’s like being imprisoned by a door that feels both ajar and locked by the sanctimony of its existence. Outside, the world could be shapeless and pure, but on the inside, it is defined, rather harshly, by the poignancy of the wait as opposed to the inevitability of arrival. The tenacity required to open it weighs heavier than accepting it has been shut all along. It’s what gives Prabha’s world its geometry, its moral fringes.

Eerily, to contrast women grappling with crises of faith, there are Jaya (Pratibha Ranta) and Anu (Divya Prabha), women willing to break through the half-ajar doors of judgement to seek pastures that lie beyond. Jaya catches a streak of dumb luck and rather than return she chooses to ride the crest of a fortuitous wave. This means they don’t have to add up to make the sea. Sometimes all you need is to somehow get to the shore of the ocean. For Anu, freedom is a blighted, unruly stroke of light that must be flipped, forked and played with to eke any sense of meaning. The city demands to annex her body, her choices, and her language of expression. Instead, she chooses to live in exile by hiding in its midst, by committing sacrilege where sanctimony forms the ceiling.

To these contrasting but familiar pairs, there is the presence of a casting coincidence from heaven – Chhaya Kadam as the solitary, war-torn sword of sorts. As Manju Mai, she is the feisty, often bitter, conqueror of destiny’s meanest hand — beaten, abandoned, redeemed. As Parvaty she is the widow, slowly being erased from the city's diary as a once-alive specimen of dual existence; the one she carries within and the one she lost with her late husband. Unfortunately, only the latter counts. The body, it’s yearning, its unfulfilled depths count for nothing. Both characters, though diametrically opposite in their pitch and instruments of resistance, offer this melancholic periscope to view the future through. In the throes of love and despair, there is at least a thrilling sense of discovery, the anticipation of catching hold of something so misshapen and reckless it becomes a new way of looking at the world. On the surface, life settles into the rhythm of letting go, of forever recovering from the idea of having swum life’s blinding, circular laps. You live on scraps until you build a house of self-belief so final, it can also be regarded as your tombstone.

Both films exact different varieties of womanhood. Impinged, emotionally encroached and physically suppressed, freedom takes the shape of love that can’t be litigated by the court of opinion, lust that can’t be practised by the privilege of space and bondage that allows the parachutes of fantasy a tiny, mound of sand to land on. Prabha’s chains become Phool’s key to unlocking a world of near-perfect symmetry. Jaya’s ambition drives her to the laboratory of the world, whereas Anu’s unsealing of her body, opens up the self a place for bold, maybe even unsatisfying experiments. The point isn’t to live right but to live like yourself. From self-contained prophecies to curricular adventures, women seek themselves in the poetry and the prose of life’s many detention centres. Each different to the last, each more formidable, stifling and complicated. To escape means to merely relocate the site of the battle. Most times you just choose the side you know will win. Sometimes, though, you can learn a lot more by losing; or staying lost.