Director – Payal Kapadia – 2017 – India – 13m
*****
An old woman, her home and her cat interact in the former’s coastal flat – Kapadia’s first short evidences a sensibility which will inform her debut feature All We Imagine as Light – on the UK Blu-ray/DVD (Dual Format Edition) of All We Imagine as Light, released Monday, March 3rd
A room with two windows looking out on the sea. The constant sound of its roar, the net curtains stir in the breeze. An elderly woman (Usha Naik) holds a bowl of milk as she calls out for, “Koshu”. Elsewhere in the house, a younger woman (Trimala Adhikari) sits, dozing, on a bench, until she hears the older woman calling her name, “Malti”. She opens her eyes.
The older and younger women stand in a room, staring, the elder explaining to the younger that the plant will last two days. As the ginger cat Koshu feeds contentedly, the younger woman Malti limps back to her room. Preparing food in the kitchen, the younger tells the older that three chillis are too much for her. The older protests.
The conversation turns to the older’s medication, the next life, and why not get a plant that lasts longer, asks the younger. “My late husband thought like that,” says the older. “He had all sorts of ideas to make it last longer. Once, I woke up in the night to find he wasn’t there.” Beyond the kitchen window is another, similar window into another, similar house. Drawings show naked women sitting beside plants. The old lady suggests they make fish for dinner. She sits at a table, tasting food pulled from a bowl with her hand.
Malti rolls out a bedroll, smooths it down, and takes a nap. She thinks she hears Sapan. He (Cephas Subba) is standing by the window. He explains his ship is here for a day. He wondered whether to visit. As she hangs up the laundry, he asks about her limp. Her knee has been paining a little bit, she explains, so she has been told not to eat rice, she says as a train can be heard to rumble past, which means she can’t sleep properly. He is the same, he says.
They sit on the stairwell of the building to talk. He recalls that the ship’s motor mysteriously went silent for three days. More passing train sounds and someone else descends the stairs to the ground, passing them. He shows her something he got her from Africa – a picture postcard of giraffes. She wants to know what the printed writing on the back says. He reads: the wind…the trees…they are but a dream… In front of you, even the stars look dull. He asks her to accompany her to the docks.
As the basement fills with steam (is this cloud? Someone fumigating the place?) she asks about the lines. “Something about the sun and the stars, he says,” as women can be heard singing or chanting in the background.
The old lady sleeps on her bed, the window looking out onto the street as, outside, the cloud or the steam rises, obscuring the view of the house opposite. Later, she wakes and sits up. Malti comes in, tidies some magazines on the bed, smooths the bedspread and neatens up the pillow.
In the kitchen, Malti stares out of the window. It’s night. Dogs bark. The old lady recalls a dream in which her husband appeared and warned her the fruit was going to rot. She went to it, but couldn’t prevent that happening. Her husband (Aurobinda Roy Chowdhury) sits by the two-day plant, by the window, barely visible in the half-light. “He didn’t recognise me,” she says. Malti looks on, unsure exactly what to think. The sea continues to roar.
An eye, and for that matter an ear, for atmospheric sights and sounds are very much in evidence in this early short from Payal Kapadia, an audiovisual sensibility that will similarly inform her debut feature All We Imagine as Light (2024). The compositional sense proves quietly striking.
More significantly, perhaps, Kapadia understands where everything in the small apartment is in relation to everything that lies immediately beyond it, and imparts to us a sense of that intimate geography of the home much as Hitchcock often did in his films (and so many directors don’t bother to do, presumably imagining that such detail is either unimportant or of little interest). However, taking such care in the details of the whereabouts of events portrayed has the effect of anchoring the narrative in a highly tangible architectural space, rendering it all the more real to the viewer.
What’s portrayed is deceptively subtle – a small network of relationships (old woman, home help, home help’s visiting male sailor friend, old woman’s bodily absent – or present as a ghost or apparition – husband) remind us, the audience, that what we are watching is merely apparition, images of characters projected on a viewing surface. Yet, these people transcend their apparition-ness to become just as real to us as their surrounding interiors. We don’t know too much about them – perhaps a feature length narrative would afford us that opportunity, but given the leisurely pace at which this short unfolds, there isn’t enough time for that here.
Still, there remains something deeply affecting about these characters and the sealed world in which they move and have their being, suggesting a director of great promise, a promise fulfilled in Kapadia’s subsequent first feature All We Imagine as Light.
Both Afternoon Clouds and the other short on this disc release And What is the Summer Saying? (2018) were shot by cinematographer Mayank Khurana.
Afternoon Cloudsis on the UK Blu-ray/DVD (Dual Format Edition) of All We Imagine as Light, released Monday, March 3rd.
All We Imagine as Light trailer: