About/Despite/Besides Love: On Archana Phadke’s Inward Gaze

Towards the end of the documentary About Love (2019), director Archana Phadke’s mother Maneesha, whose proclivity as an author is a revelation for her daughter through the camera, narrates a section from an unpublished piece about two women separated by time but harbouring similar desires to be heard and loved unconditionally. One of the women is imagined by Maneesha as her own fictional iteration, who maintains something is amiss despite having a family with children.

About Love focuses its lens on the Phadke family in all their idiosyncrasies, as the director straddles the role of filmmaker, daughter and sibling during the course of its making for over three years. She does not intervene when her grandparents have an argument but sets down the camera to help her grandmother open a jar. This exercise in nuance is pervasive throughout the film, as three generations of the family—especially its women—are encapsulated by the distance that informs their respective worldviews as well as the patriarchal strictures that bind them in a shared experience of compromise. Wielding the premise of her brother’s upcoming nuptials, the director turns the camera inward to capture the ebb and flow of what she calls “unspectacular time,” revealing her family through the structures of power, control and compliance which have shaped its generational dynamics. It begs the questions then, how does “love” work in this patriarchal setting?

The older family members often coax the Phadke sisters who are in their 30s to enter marriage. The film places this insistence against the sisters’ apprehensions about the institution as they not only witness their mother and grandmother wither against its constraints but also how the latter has had to consistently accommodate disrespect for years. At one point, Phadke’s physically frail, octogenarian grandfather can be seen hurling sexist profanities at his wife—to which she retorts, “I hope you’re attacked by a lion!” Otherwise timid, the grandmother’s gesture of defiance registers as both comic and poignant, especially given how her disobedience assumes the tone of an innocuous, inconsequential hope.

Moving up a floor (and a generation), Phadke’s parents engage in a brief argument over unfinished work. Following her husband’s departure from the room, Maneesha breaks into a wry laughter. “My brain stops working when your father is there,” she admits. The laughter stops just as suddenly, and she closes her eyes and sobs (before the director enters the frame and comforts her). It is testament to a common experience in South Asian households where women feel bound to the choices and decisions of their male partners from an assumed confidence in their intelligence; the women find themselves lost in this equation, their say registering in relatively quieter spaces. Maneesha finds that space in writing, and it is soon revealed that she has been working on a novel for a while. At a later point, however, the parents are seen gleefully rehearsing dance moves for their son’s wedding. Articulations of love in the Phadke household include not only gendered interpersonal dynamics but also cultivated navigations around long-durational companionship. Phadke has admitted to having observed her family anew through her camera; the distance allowed by the lens let her tease out the chaos in her family members who become individuals in their own right. These vagaries of habit and affection mostly register in moments that emerge from disruptions of authority; the women profess their regrets and complaints in progressive strides before the camera as the director gradually chips at their veneer.

Most of the documentary takes place in the interiors of the ancestral Phadke building in downtown Mumbai, whose multiple tiers play a significant role in how the relationships segregate, navigate and congregate on occasion. The family’s emotional landscape reflects in the mise-en-scene: a bedside cluttered with medicines, an abundance of plastic folders, the kind of familiar density that comes with decades of residence and the attendant comfort in middle-class households. Phadke has spoken about how this lens on her own family is informed by her formative training in biotechnology, which necessitated perusing small-scale ecosystems to study the dynamics that sustain them. In the documentary, Phadke confines herself to the building, allowing the viewer only a glimpse of the chawls and high-rises that surround it as she adopts this inward gaze during its making. Shot completely on a hand-held video camera, the film works with the intimate format to reveal absurd spaces that come with keen observations and accidents of improvisation. Phadke’s lens captures the women of the family in moments of quietude—writing on the computer, cleaning, looking over the terrace into the neighbourhood, collecting a stray kite or simply feeling emotionally distant in a crowd. The film lingers on these images as a witness to their unfolding inner narratives, presenting sincere vignettes that resonate in their ubiquity. As Maneesha narrates the extract from her work, the camera establishes itself as a medium between her and the director, attesting to a gingerly evolving relationship that enables her to lay bare her feelings of entrapment. Love is far removed from its romantic connotations in this film; among the Phadkes, love is situated in the regularity of banter, speech, conflict and norm, and in the crevices where they are momentarily resisted.

All Images from About Love (2019, 1h 31m). Images courtesy of the director.