Review: Ritesh Batra's "The Lunchbox" salvages a bumbling industry.

Once in a while comes a movie that leaves you lost for words and impels you into thinking a great deal about where cinema can take you. And seldom do we give that sort of recognition to a Hindi movie. Until someone, and I'm talking about Batra here, changes the general conception of Hindi cinema and delivers a grand little film about life and its aggravations. I'm here to disclose - alright, jabber - about a little gem that made me want to hop into the screen, into the story with its characters and have a talk with them. Batra's The Lunchbox is not only the best Hindi film in about a decade or so but also one of the best romance-dramas in a while to make its way to the big screen.

We often see the city of Mumbai being delineated as an unostentatious character but rare is a movie that actually exploits that attribute. That's precisely where The Lunchbox grasped my attention. Batra works up a script with a minimalist plot to serve as our guide through the city's beguiling streets and creates characters that are so tangible that you'd mistake them for being actual people. There is one dotard, Saajan Fernandes, who is retiring from his job of thirty-five years next month. Fernandes is a frigid recluse who likes to do things his way. He lives alone, his wife's been dead for a long time and the neighborhood kids aren't taking a liking to him. Not that he minds that one bit. He's been living the same life for a long time, it seems, since his daily schedule doesn't change much. Always the same train, always the same seat and always the one cigarette he allows himself after he gets back home from work.

Ila is a glum housewife who isn't enjoying her life either. A mother of a young daughter, she finds solace in cooking new dishes to send to her husband, who is at work, for lunch. She has devised a sagacious way of communication with her elder neighbor, who lives upstairs and with whom she exchanges recipes and stories.

Aslam Shaikh is an ebullient and talkative young trainee who is up for Fernandes' job when he retires. Shaikh wants Fernandes to train him, build him into a workhorse, but Fernandes is reluctant, unrelenting.

One day, Ila decides to try out a new recipe. She whips up a palatable meal for her spouse but the tiffin ends up on the desk of Fernandes. The dabbawallahs - tiffin carriers - of Mumbai are infamous for never getting a delivery wrong. This a story of what happens when they do. Fernandes is dumbfounded to find his lunch so tasty. Ila is stunned to find the tiffin empty. Both realize something is amiss. On the insistence of her neighbor, Ila decides to write a letter to Fernandes and thank him for doing justice to her dishes. Fernandes replies, a cold, bruising letter, but Ila writes back. A strange bond develops between them when they talk about their personal lives and what are their views on anything that fancies them. They advise each other, sympathize with each other and occasionally share a joke or two. It's an escapade neither of them wants to give up. Until the time they decide to meet up.

The Lunchbox is a rare piece of cinema that revels in the most inimitable detailing. Crafted with great elegance and dexterity, Batra creates a movie that at once disarms us with its honesty and then amazes us with its simplicity. The characters don't indulge in anything out of the ordinary, like we'd expect them to, and instead scour their routines to find something that'd delight them. Like in a scene where Fernandes buys a street-side painting because he's fascinated by the work put in by its artist. Or when he learns and marvels at how carefully Shaikh cuts his vegetables and with great skill. These are little things, you see, little things that make someone's day. We aren't following the lives of some influential people. These characters are like us, they are us. They're thrifty. They do what we do, say what we say. It's a careful perusal of the city and the people that live here. It's also a vey affectionate obeisance to them and to the dabbawallahs, who are integral to the film.

My favorite sequence of the movie was the talk after Shaikh's wedding. Shaikh and Fernandes have a conversation and Shaikh cheekily confesses to have travelled without a ticket the first time they travelled together. He fears what Fernandes may think of him. He doesn't want to lie anymore to the one person who he is comfortable being with. The scene is rather mellow but it's written, directed and performed adeptly. Phenomenal!

Irrfan Khan, who plays Fernandes, is on some sort of a mission here. He's flawless. I can't describe his performance any better. I'm trying to find a word to describe just how brilliant his performance really is but my vocabulary shames me. It's his personal best. Fernandes is someone whom we've known all our lives, someone who happens to be in every train, every bus we travel in. Khan does a remarkable job of playing him that way. In one scene, after he's pleased with his day's work, he writes to Ila saying that he treated himself to a taxi ride home. I chuckled at that small moment when a small sentence said something really profound. And, at that moment, I realized that I often do the same thing and so do most of the people in the city. That's his triumph, you see. He succeeds and how!

Nawazuddin Siddiqui is incredible as Shaikh. Shaikh often doubles up as a comic relief but Siddiqui manages to be charming and immensely genial with his antics. He has plenty of room for extemporization and he manages to make Shaikh as warm as the romance between Fernandes and Ila. You won't believe it's the same guy who played a murderous druggie in the Gangs Of Wasseypur saga.

Nimrat Kaur makes her debut with this film but it seems like we've known her for a long time. Ila's conflicted and undervalued. She's a bungled distraction for her husband. Kaur manages to give an enchanting performance that never lets up. Like her exchanges with her brash neighbor, her performance is often insightful and always delightful.

The Lunchbox should've been sent to the Oscars as India's official entry for the Best Foreign-Language Film award but it couldn't make it. Which is a shame, because it would've been the best chance any Indian film ever had in the span of five decades. Still, it is the best Hindi film in a long, long time and it would be felonious to spurn it.

If you haven't already watched this small masterwork of a debutant, please do so. And if you do go for it, I'd advise you to go on an empty stomach. Because The Lunchbox glorifies the hot tiffin and the women who make it, and it's impossible that you'd walk out of it unsmiling. Dig into this nummy concoction.

Bon appetit!

Essay: John Hughes : A Filmmaker Who Understood The Audience.

There's a really good chance that you'd walk into a John Hughes film and come out smiling, aware of the fact that you might have just seen a movie that you know at the moment would not be the last time you'll see it. And when I really think of this stuff, I find that nobody has invented a situation wherein you won't enjoy a movie by Hughes. You can watch it when you're angry, sad, hopeful, despondent, it'll go all too well with your lunch and your dinner, you can make your Sunday by lazing out on a couch, curling up against a bowl of popcorn and watching the goofiness unfold.

It's never easy to make a movie on teenage angst. Never. And when you check out the profile of Hughes, you'll find out that the guy had PhD'ed in the genre. A rather quiet loner when he was young, all his movies were a result of his acute powers of observation and unabated creativity. Hughes made movie after movie on young people and their ambitions, often incorporating characters who are conflicted and frustrated, and he did it better than any filmmaker ever could.

I remember watching Hughes' Ferris Bueller's Day Off, my first Hughes movie, and surprising myself by how much I enjoyed it. You walk into a theater for one of the two reasons : either you're looking for an escapist diversion from your poky little life or you're looking for a spiritual and meaningful experience that only cinema can provide. The second case is rare, which makes you a definite sucker for the first one. Hughes understood that. He knew his audience, he knew their expectations when they lay down a few bucks for a ticket and he made movies suitably conforming to them. His films were just as they were - uproariously funny, frequently moving, gleefully goofy and always, always optimistic. At the end of the day, every single character went home a little wiser, a little happier, like you.

I haven't seen his debut, Sixteen Candles, though. But my first viewing of The Breakfast Club left me speechless. A coming-of-age comedy drama set in an authoritarian school, it's how six starchy students spend their time in detention on a Saturday. And the whole movie's shot in a single location with only seven characters giving it its soul. There's the Brat Pack, as they were known at the time, their conversations, their secrets and worries, their ambitions and their contrition. If you're looking for a visual feast, there isn't any. There's not even an attempt to allure you by utilizing tawdry gimmicks, which seem to have found a sure footing now, or by getting a big-shot star cast with hearty smiles. No, here's a movie that's aware of its audience, aware of its content and here's a virtuoso that illuminates his observations through his characters. There's a really slim chance that you weren't an ear at some point of time to what these characters talk about. It isn't new, you know, it's just too real. There isn't any fucking around, the characters are really honest in their answers and there's a whole lot of truth to sit through. A hell of a movie, I found.

Hughes' movies are often accused of being formulaic, which they most certainly are. Break down two of his movies, any two of 'em, and you'll find that they do resemble each other in terms of structure and writing. I mean, look at John Bender from The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Are they similar? Like two peas, aren't they? Yet the situations we've seen them in aren't similar. It's the same old story, the one we know too well, but it's treated differently. It's the cue of a great filmmaker when you watch a concept that's you identify with and then you find out that it has taken you by surprise by its newfangled scrubbing.

Unfortunately, we saw far too little of Hughes. His last directorial outing, Curly Sue, was way back in 1991. And after it being a bomb at the box-office, he sustained himself by writing and producing movies till his death in 2009. I was sad to hear about his demise, for he was the one filmmaker who took me back to my adolescence with his movies and his survey of the trepidation of the young.

There have been attempts to clone his movies, his formulas, his ideas but they haven't been acceded to, at least by me. Because I don't believe anyone's got that zing that Hughes galvanized his movies with. Thank you, sir, for reminding me of my salad days, for making me believe that cinema can be so enjoyable that nothing else would even remotely matter. And may I add that your movies still make my Sundays rapturous.

Essay: The "Before" Trilogy : Is it under-appreciated?

I'm not a big sucker for romantic movies, especially if they involve a lot of drama. Comedy? Fine, I'll sit through it without grumbling even if the jokes don't get to me. You know why? Because my perception of romantic movies has been bludgeoned over the years. I've noticed that movies often delight me boundlessly by their observations, not by their creations. And what do you get to see in a romantic movie? What? You get a boy and a girl, you get forbidden love and you get a happy ending. And, if the director's got enough balls, he opts for a tragic denouement. That's the hackneyed romance that makers often dye and coat and puff right in your eyes. Smug, ain't it?

One day, I got wind of this movie called Before Sunrise, which was what you'd usually call a movie with a minimalist plot. I could probably describe the story to you in a line but what the movie really was can't be. I checked out the trailer, a really promising one, and I decided to grab a seat and watch it. To be honest, I hadn't even heard of Richard Linklater back then though I really dug up his works after I saw Before Sunrise.

Before Sunrise was the ancient yarn of a boy who meets a girl. On a train. Going to Vienna. He's American. She's French. They talk. That's the story.

This probably sounds dumb in your head, doesn't it? And yet, here I am, talking about it like its hot canard. Yeah, go ahead, call me a loony, but the magic of Before Sunrise does not lie in what you see but it lies in what you hear. Richard Linklater, like some dark wizard that he is, takes an absurdly simple story, twists and turns it into a living, breathing firecracker of a film that's at once fluffy and honest. Before Sunrise isn't all fluff, no sir, but it's a movie that braves to put forward some thoughts that you'd rather not think aloud, especially not in front of others, but Jesse and Celine speak them aloud for us. They're still kids but they are kids who understand what life is, what feelings are. They know it, they have experienced it, they are experiencing it. And we follow them during the time their thoughts animate on-screen as they stroll on the beautiful streets of Vienna, which doubles up as a comfort character. Never since Roman Polanski's masterful Chinatown has a movie had me gaping for every word of the conversations. They sound extemporized, like Linklater thought it'd be cool to throw in a boy and a girl in Vienna and film what they talk about. They go places, yeah, they meet people and they see some of the city. They're divided in their opinions, honest in their answers and casual in their behavior. There's romantic tension between them and it's handled sensitively. It's found gold this, because I haven't seen a romance movie quite like it.

Until I saw its sequel Before Sunset.

Thank God for small mercies, I got a chance to watch Before Sunset right after I completed Before Sunrise. Because I pity those poor sods who had to wait nine whole, long, agonizing years to hear them talk again. Jesse and Celine grew on me, their thoughts arrested my fascination like no other characters' ever have. I met them again, this time in Paris. Yeah, life went on for them but their notions hadn't matured yet. That part is still ripe, much to my delight. It was like meeting old friends you hadn't met in a long time and now you can't wait to hear their side of what went on for them after their last meting with you. Jesse was now a successful writer doing a book-tour. His first book was about a girl he had met whilst on a train and the one night he spent with her in Vienna. And the girl finds him in Paris nine years later. He's married, she's not. He's tranquil, she's not. They're still kids in their own way, like in a scene where Celine jokingly shows him the finger when he contradicts her conception on a subject. He has eighty minutes till a flight out of there. She invites him for a coffee, he agrees. All good, all excited. But seriously, we get eighty fucking minutes? If you have seen Before Sunrise, you'd know that eighty minutes is scant. Way too scant.

Ah, but it's still eighty minutes of pure bliss! Linklater outdoes himself yet again, creating a romance like no other. One may argue that Before Sunset is no romance. True, it's not, it's more like a rendezvous in Paris. Attraction is mostly absent this time around, sadly, though I had not expected one. One again we're an audience to a witty, allusive and strikingly intelligent talk about life and other things. Eighty minutes later, Jesse and Celine are a tease. Linklater joshes us by fading out at the precise moment when things get critical. The anguish, the fucking anguish!

Fortunately for me, nine years later, they're going to meet again. Some have already met them halfway across the globe but I haven't. Before Midnight is going to be the final chapter in the trilogy. It's an accomplished piece of work, no less, squashed from a one-line idea. It's takes a special talent to make three engaging, astute movies having the same characters talking more or less about the same things but being perky and waggish every single time you bump into them. If we're lucky - and I really hope we are - Linklater will find time to make a small movie on them again. Maybe how they spend a Sunday?

One of the many things that unexpectedly pops up in my mind when I talk about the Before trilogy is - why hasn't it been nominated for an Academy Award yet? I mean, yeah, it has, but nominating Before Sunset for the Academy Award For Best Adapted Screenplay is more like a given, you know, a certainty. Why has it been shivved for Best Picture or Best Director? It's good enough for either one, don't you think? I may be barking because I'm a major fan of the trilogy but when I change perspectives, trade my place for a regular movie-going guy, I don't contradict myself. It deserves appreciation, more than just a single nomination. Now, I don't mean to be biased but when I look at the biggest trilogy of all-time, Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings, I find that Linklater's Before deserves a place right beside it. It may not be a trilogy of a similar scale and grandiose but it does achieve what it sets out to, like Jackson's. It delivers to us an utterly magnificent piece of cinema that engages us and derides our courage, our imagination. And that's something very hard to come by.

I do hope that Before Midnight will be that film which breaks the malediction. If it does, I wouldn't say that one part of the trilogy has won. I'd say it won the Oscar that it wholly deserved for eighteen years.



 

Essay: The Shameless Obsession With Remakes. Arrrgh!

It's raining remakes in the Hindi film industry, which means it is time to smother yourself to near-death with your cushion every time some modern machismo mouths off corny lines when the villain insults his long-widowed mother or his morose spinster sister. No, I'm not against remakes per se but I do have a certain aversion to them. Because the whole shitty business is a way to earn a few bucks more and make the people who were credited with the original have a cardiac arrest in their tub of tomato popcorn right in the middle of the theater while watching the carnage revel in front of them.

What I do enjoy about the whole remake business is how those numbnuts justify their decision to coerce their baloney on us. The most exploited response is, "Oh, I just loved that movie as a child! And now when I watch it again, I still love it! I simply want to pay a befitting tribute to it." And that too accompanied by a vapid droll on how the whole movie influenced the five-year old mind of theirs years ago when the guy had no idea what the movie business was. And so began a trend in the industry. People dove into their memories to search for that one damned bond they have with their adolescence and we were the wretched casualties of the hokum that followed.

Now, allow me to list the recent remakes that got high on the ballyhoo - Agneepath, Chashme Baddoor, Himmatwala, Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag and Zanjeer. I concede, I haven't seen any of these bogeys simply because I haven't dared to. To be fair, Agneepath isn't entirely bad, I'm told, as a matter of fact, it's pretty watchable. Hrithik Roshan reprised the cult character that gave Amitabh Bachchan his identity. The makers retained the names that glorified the middling original for their visionary remake but in terms of storytelling it wasn't exactly unassailable. Oooo! Smart move, getting the stars and the names. Too bad it didn't work for the movie as well as it did for the general public. Tsk Tsk.

Filmmaker David Dhawan has been in the industry for quite a long time. And, if my memory serves, at one point of time, he was releasing four movies a year. All comedies, all nonsensical. But yeah, I confess, I'm a fan of them. Dhawan's Haseena Maan Jayegi, my favorite film of his, entertained and biffed in equal measures. So, the question that pervaded my mind for a while was : why would he bother to remake a classic? I mean, doesn't he already have a sufficiently enviable list of comedies under his belt? But no, David didn't think so. He remade Sai Paranjpye's majestic Chashme Buddoor with a godawful cast that gave me goosebumps. I couldn't bear to even think about it. And when I saw the frenetic promo, I knew that the die had been cast. The makers were intent on creating - or killing - the spirit of the original. Nope, didn't work out either way. Now, can we please have a screening of Paranjpye's magical tour de force? If not, could we have the old David back?

The remaining movies are pure dreck that don't deserve a piece to be written on them. Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag or What Were You Thinking, Ramu? is often considered the worst Hindi film ever made along with a lot of other worsts. Think worst mistake, worst cast and, uh, worst torture technique. So painful, so strident was this Ram Gopal Varma movie that it destroyed a lot of careers. Not that they showed any promise anyway. And yeah, Ramu went down with it. He's still in the movie business though. Made some tripe called Department a while back and gave Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag a run for its money. No, don't worry, Mr. Varma, your movie didn't destroy your visionary debacle. Tsk, I still consider your Satya as one of the best Hindi films ever made, sir. Please don't kill it with Satya 2. The trailer's got me dead worried, sir.

It takes guts to remake a classic. But it takes more to remake it with an unbelievably trashy cast. I'm talking about Zanjeer, the new remake not making waves in tinsel town. The original Zanjeer made Amitabh Bachchan the man he is today. And Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar's terrifically scripted lines and characters made Prakash Mehra the man he was. So, Mehra's sons decided one day that they want to remake Father's old masterpiece. They did, with Telugu superstar Ramcharan playing the iconic role that Bachchan immortalized. Prakash Raj, who usually plays comical villains with a bloated ego, took up the role of Teja. Priyanka Chopra, who was incredible in the so-so Barfi! last year, must've been finagled for a signature on the contract, I think, because no actor in their right minds would agree to this. And did Sanjay Dutt know what he was getting into? The movie's bad, I hear. Worse than bad. I don't have anything to say against it. The casting did the talking for me.

Sajid Khan fancies himself as an entertainer. Not a filmmaker, mind you, but as an entertainer. His movie's aren't anything to yap about, you know. Because when an entertainer is made in the Hindi film industry, creativity usually goes down the drain tooth-first. That's the case with Khan's films. He remade his favorite film as a kid, Himmatwala, that is now used as an example in film-schools as how not to make a movie. I got the gist from the trailer in which the possessory credits read A Sajid Khan Entertainer. Groan! As if the trailer wasn't already bad and derisive, not to forget the remake of an already terrible film, we now have to get used to the misleading credits being misused for an actual entertainer. Because Himmatwala wasn't entertaining in any way. In fact, it wasn't even an honorary addition to those so-bad-that-it's-good kind of movies. Shivved everywhere in every which way, folks.

So, remaking movies is apparently now a business in the industry. And that's a bad enough sign if anything else isn't. Creativity is usually farted upon - can't anyone see that, too? - in the remakes but, you know, I talk to the wall in such cases. I hear some other classics have been racked up to be remade. As if the trendsetters above haven't argued on the case already. If the guys who are thinking of remaking a few other classics into piffle, make sure you watch these movies before the go-ahead. They are valid reasons to kick the whole idea.