The Female Body Unsexualised in ‘All We Imagine as Light’

Payal Kapadia’s deliberate positioning of the uncensored breasts in a mundane, routine setting redefines how we look at the female body

We live in a culture where women and their bodies are always either sexualised or sanctified - almost no in between - and it renders them voiceless either way. They are glorified when it is convenient for the man, and just as easily exploited, the unasked-for patriarchal pedestal snatched from beneath their feet. The Madonna-Whore Complex (the patriarchal notion of classifying women either as saintly Madonnas or outright “whores”) is so deeply rooted in our concept of gender, that there is no way for a woman and her body to simply… be. 

I remember distinctly the experience of watching the only fully ‘nude’ scene in ‘All We Imagine as Light’. When Anu (Divya Prabha) was changing her clothes and her breasts were revealed, a knowing smile had begun to play on my lips. It was the sheer weight of the choice Payal Kapadia made to position the breasts as ordinary, even seemingly mundane parts of her body, especially while depicting such a routine activity as changing one’s clothes. Emphasis on “parts of her body” - it was a conscious effort to extract the very idea of ‘sexualised’ femininity that seems to come attached to these lumps of fat which have always ‘characterised’ women. Anu’s body in that scene is just that - a body, like any other body. A privilege of a feeling that women don’t experience very often. 

This scene only becomes all the more powerful in retrospect when, during the sex scene later in the film, Anu’s breasts remain covered. With this, Payal Kapadia pointedly and unapologetically cuts off the audience's access to, and thus power over, the body and what (they think) makes it sexually feminine. By doing this, she effectively unsexualises the breasts, frees them from the suffocating weight of trying to be desirable to someone else. As a woman, it's liberating to watch.

It’s a subtle but sharply clever dig on an entire society’s ideals of obscenity. We’ve only been conditioned to see the nude female body, even when it is purposefully unsexualised, as shamefully obscene. And we are now in a society that is becoming increasingly more intolerant of ‘obscenity’ - and where the very term is defined by the people in power, who are mostly the same people who perpetrate the Madonna-Whore complex. 

In such a society and such a time, Payal Kapadia’s directorial choice of choosing to keep the breasts uncensored in the most unexpectedly ordinary scene seeks to redefine the very portrayal of the female body. Anu’s breasts aren’t objects or even ‘symbols’, really - they are neither pedestalised nor sexualised, but are merely parts of a female body, like any other body.