The Lunchbox (***)

The serendipitous mix-up has served the basis for many a romantic comedy, but quiet drama predominates here. Ila (Nimrat Kaur) is a Mumbai housewife whose hot lunches inadvertently get routed to government worker Saajan (Irrfan Khan) instead of her husband. With minimal set-up but perhaps a touch of contrivance — how is it that the delivery service suddenly starts making the same mistake every day? — the housewife and the office worker begin a correspondence. In no time the talk turns from food to other things. The spice that goes into Ila’s delicious meals has gone out of her marriage; Saajan, a widower about to take early retirement, lives a lonely life.

And so they pass old-fashioned notes on paper while never seeing each other. The chaste exchange, which reminded me of the 1987 film 84 Charing Cross Road, is as much about the need to unburden oneself as about the very gentle romantic subtext. The two leads serve as somewhat idealized recipients these wishes folded in paper, and the appeal of the film is very much about the lovely idea that one might accidentally find such a person. The only other significant character is the man who will replace Saajan at his job, although Ila has an upstairs neighbor who is heard, but not seen. For those who enjoyed the view of Mumbai in Slumdog Millionaire, this movie presents it as equally bustling, but a little less terrifying.


Inasmuch as the two main characters have not met and do not really know each other, the ending carries the story forward, but not too far, and that seems just right.

IMDb link

viewed 4/3/14 7:10 pm at Ritz East and posted 4/3/14

Life of Pi (***1/2)

Like Cast Away, much of this story is about a man stranded and alone, but instead of being American he is Indian, instead of an island he is on a small boat, and instead of a volleyball his only companion is a non-human predator called Richard Parker. Director Ang Lee and screenwriter David Magee’s (Finding Neverland) adaptation of the Yann Martel bestseller is faithful to the novel’s spirit, though it omits many details about how to survive alone on a lifeboat.

Perhaps unnecessarily, Lee preserves the novel’s structure — a grown man, in Canada, telling the story of his distant childhood in India, and then his perilous voyage, to a curious stranger — and adds frequently gorgeous visuals: shimmering skies, glowing seas, and pastel cityscapes suggestive of a fable. Pi’s is a story  “to make you believe in God,” the stranger has been told. Pi (played winsomely by newcomer Suraj Shjarma), the son of an atheist, himself subscribes to Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, and an element of spirituality runs through the movie, which can alternately be seen as a kind of magical realism. In some sense, both book and film draw a parallel between religious faith and storytelling, suggesting that the power of a good story is more important than certainty or literal truth. One need not agree to enjoy this existential story of adventure.

IMDb link

viewed 2/11/13 7:00 pm at Ritz East

Trishna (**3/4)

Transplanting a novel like Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) to the present day might be problematic, since the cultural context is so specific. The rigid hierarchies of Victorian England no longer exist in modern Britain. But they do in India, where traveling from a remote village to a city like Mumbai is, in some respects, to travel in time as well as distance. In addition to altering the setting, Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation (his third Hardy-inspired drama) heavily abridges and alters the plot, but retains the emphasis on its heroine’s humble origins.

In the course of the story young Trishna (Frieda Pinto) travels from her father’s home in a poor village to Mumbai. The apt cliché is, you can take the girl out of the small town, but not the small town out of the girl. That, however, is both more succinct and more direct than Winterbottom’s script. He tells much of the story visually, and in the way his two leads act and speak. Trishna/Pinto, so deferential at the start of the film that it’s startling, changes as she leaves home. A young man (Riz Ahmed) makes this possible, the worldly, wealthy, son of an Anglo-Indian gentleman (Roshan Seth, playing the only secondary character of any interest). Eventually, the young man changes too.

Their relationship develops slowly, and the movie requires patience. I appreciated the subtlety with which Winterbottom depicts the diversity of modern India. Perhaps the strongest scenes, done with minimum dialogue, show the way Trishna’s relationship with her lover changes when the two leave Mumbai. At the same time, I felt that Winterbottom relied too much on the viewer’s knowledge of the lingering effects of caste. One knows it, but does not always feel it, which is crucial in understanding things as they develop. What should be devastating is merely sad.

IMDb link

viewed 7/24/12 7:30 pm at Ritz East (PFS screening) and reviewed 7/25/12

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (***)

“For the elderly and beautiful” reads the legend on the sign of the namesake hotel in this comedy-drama, whose cast amounts to an employment program for some British actors of a certain age. Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton are the married couple. Judi Dench is the recent widow. Celia Imrie is the man hunter, and the aptly named Ronald Pickup her male counterpart. Maggie Smith…is the bigot. Tom Wilkinson is the just-retired businessman returning to his long-ago home, which is Jaipur, India. Which is the home of the once-majestic, still exotic Marigold. And which is where all of these characters have come, even the bigot, because the living (and the medical care) is cheaper in England.

In hardly ten minutes of screen time — I didn’t quite get how it was arranged — they all manage to arrive into the same previously unoccupied hotel at the very same time. Whereupon the young proprietor (Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel, playing a similarly optimistic character) adds “Now with guests!” to the hotel’s sign sign. A bunch of English folk learning life lessons in a poor country is a plot ripe for cliché. These are not completely avoided—most obviously simplistic is the story of the proprietor, whose mother disapproves of his girlfriend, scoffs at his plans to revive the hotel, would prefer an arranged marriage to a Delhi girl, etc. However, the key to this kind of film is to be able to establish the several characters efficiently without making them into clichés, and this is done. Even Wilton’s character, the least likeable and most resistant to India’s charms, is sympathetic, at times, in her despair.

The script (from Deborah Maggoch’s novel) by Ol Parker (Imagine Me & You) is sometimes witty. The direction by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) highlights the colors of the Pink City and avoids making the old folks “cute.” (In this respect, I would contrast it with some of Richard Curtis’s work, like Love, Actually, which I found to be faux “adorable.”) The English seem to specialize in ensemble-cast dramedies, and this one is fairly good, if occasionally meandering.

IMDB link

viewed 5/2/12 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/3/12

Raju [short] (***1/2)

A German couple’s joy at meeting their adoptive son in India is temporary as they learn that Kolkata’s crowded streets are an easy place to lose someone. The film becomes a cultural window into the vast gulf between a poor country and a rich one, and the way a crisis can reveal one’s values. Probably the best of the five nominees for the Oscar for best live-action short.

IMDb link

viewed 2/17/12 9:35 at Ritz Bourse [Oscar-nominated live-action shorts program] and reviewed 2/18/12

Patang (*3/4)

In the heart of old (crowded) Ahmedabad, western India’s largest city, a family gathers on the eve of the city’s annual kite-flying festival. Jayesh, a successful businessman in Delhi, has traveled 500 miles with his college-age daughter to revisit his former home. And…that’s all. It takes over an hour for anything truly dramatic to happen, and even then it would be stretching to call it a plot, but then it’s over in any case. The colorful photography is something to look at, though.

IMDb link

Viewed at Ritz 5 11/1/11 7:50 pm [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 11/1/11

Slumdog Millionaire (***1/4)

A potentially cheesy rags-to-riches story becomes an urban folk tale in director Danny Boyle’s foray into the mean streets of Mumbai. Boyle has made films in a variety of genres, nearly all of them morality plays in one fashion or another. Best known are Trainspotting, a tale of heroin addiction, and 28 Days Later, the post-apocalyptic zombie hit. Here, he grafts the punky attitude and gritty urbanism of Trainspotting onto a quasi-fable reminiscent of Boyle’s 2004 Millions. Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, best known for a couple of other urban fables, The Full Monty and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, adapted an Indian novel.

British actor Dev Patel plays the lead role of Jamal, suspected of cheating on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, with all of the other roles filled by Indian actors. The childhood scenes of Jamal, his brother, and their female friend Latika are so natural that they anchor a fairly hoary plot later on. The children, non-professionals, speak Hindi with colored supertitles floating on screen. Jamal loses track of his childhood friend, but not his hope or lack of guile. The plot’s structured as flashbacks tied to the questions asked by a host who seems more like Simon Cowell than Regis Philbin. On the threshold of winning the 20 million rupee top prize, Jamal is interrogated because of the unlikeliness of an ill-educated teenager gathering the required knowledge. (In fact, the explanation is only partly convinving, but I went with it, discovering along the way my own ignorance of Indian culture.)

Almost as much of a character as Jamal is the incredibly diverse city of Mumbai (formerly Bombay). Frequently employing handheld digital cameras, Boyle infuses the film with the sounds and sights of this metropolis of 20 million, though never in a travelogue sort of way. A couple of cruel scenes, one involving a child, earned the film a probably unfair R rating in the US, but the tone is never pitiful, despite the great poverty (and intermittent violence) depicted. It’s a crowd pleaser, mostly in the best sense of the term.

IMDB link

viewed 11/19/08 [screening at Ritz 5]; reviewed 11/21/08

The Love Guru (*3/4)

This represents the inauspicious return of Mike Myers, who, except for his voice roles in the last two Shrek movies, hasn’t appeared on screen since 2003. It would be nice to report that his semi-parody is a return to form for the star of the Wayne’s World and Austin Powers movies, but it isn’t so.

Myers’s character, the Guru Pitka, comes out of his association with Deepak Chopra, the Indian-born self-help author whom Myers credits for his own spiritual renewal. Thanks to Chopra, Pitka is only the second-biggest Indian self-help guru. (He grew up in an ashram after a being orphaned there.) Myers penned the intro to Chopra’s latest book, and Chopra shows up in the film, so I wouldn’t have expected a piercing satire of the self-help movement. Still, even a gentle parody can be funny, but to use one of the mnemonic devices the guru favors, this is all DRAMA, no comedy. DRAMA of course, stands for “Distraction, Regression, Adjustment, Maturity and Action,” which, if seen as a metaphor for Myers’s career, finds the writer-actor still working on the third stage.

The early scenes establishes Pitka as guru to the stars and has a couple of bits that aren’t awful. In one of several pseudo-Hindi coinages, the guru’s standard greeting to his followers is “Marisha Hargitay,” which may be amusing if you’re familiar with the Law and Order: SVU actress of that name, but definitely won’t be after you hear it a dozen times in the movie. Repetition also drains the humor from the other (very) few decent gags in the movie, which very lightly spoofs celebrity culture. But Hollywood is not the main setting, Toronto is. Pitka has been called into service to by the Maple Leafs hockey team, whose Stanley Cup chances are threatened by the poor play of its slumping, emotionally addled star.

As much as I appreciated Myers’s nod to his Canadian roots, it is at this point, barely 15 minutes into the movie, that it truly misfires. Hereon, the plot is silly and the gags juvenile or puerile, smutty single-entrendres that make Austin Powers—well, at least the first two films—look sophisticated. Along for the ride is Jessica Alba as the team owner, who is not a great actress but can hardly be blamed for the unbelievability of her character’s supposed romance with the guru. The team captain is played by Verne Troyer, Mini-Me from Austin Powers, apparently just so Pitka can throw a gaggle of short jokes in his direction. There is also the “gag” that has now become a signpost for uninspired comedy, the one where a randomly propelled object like, say, a hockey puck hits a character on the head. Myers also has a tendency to mug for the camera, and so he/Pitka laughs more at his own jokes than the audience did.

Via the laugh-challenged trifecta of Austin Powers in Goldmember, View from the Top, and The Cat in the Hat, Myers had arguably eclipsed Chevy Chase’s ex-Saturday Night Live star speed record for going from hip to hopeless, and this only confirms it. In the spirit of the movie itself, I must coin my own memory aid:

Movies
You’ll
End up
Regretting
Seeing™

Sorry, Mike.

IMDB link

viewed 6/21/08

The Darjeeling Limited (***)

IMDB link

The Namesake (***1/4)

? Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding) directed this adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel about Bengali immigrants to the United States, with Kal Penn playing their son as an adult. The adaptation is by Sooni Taraporevala, who also scripted Nair’s breakthrough film Salaam Bombay and its follow-up, Mississippi Masala, which was her first to tackle the culture-clash themes explored here.
+ There’s something about the storytelling here that begs to be called beautiful. It’s an appealingly quiet film in which Nair’s camera carefully expresses the feelings of the characters, especially the parents. Snowy rooftops and quiet music stand for the isolation felt by the mother, who does not adapt as readily as her husband to her adopted country. The Namesake doesn’t overplay the culture-clash angle, but instead incorporates that as part of a larger story about a changing family dynamic. Even as the focus shifts to the son’s story, it reminds us that the older generation continues to experience life’s changes even as the new one grows up.
- Undoubtedly some people will find the movie slow, and the plot is by no means earth-shattering.
= ***1/4 This is in some ways an Indian story, but in more significant ways one about assimilation and family life, something like Barry Levinson’s Avalon, but less depressing and less sweeping.

IMDB link

reviewed 4/6/07

Water (**1/2)

The plight of the widow in India, the particulars of India’s caste system, and the promise of change brought by Gandhi are certainly excellent subjects for a film, but this Water doesn’t really move, in any sense.

Set in 1938, Deepa Mehta’s Water follows an eight-year-old as she’s sent to an ashram, a place where widows are sent to live and worship together. Because the movies deal with antiquated female-oriented social systems, and start the same way, with a child being unwillingly taken from her home, I was mentally comparing this with Memoirs of a Geisha. Where the geisha system simultaneously exploits and empowers women, the ashram is portrayed as essentially a dumping ground for used-up women who are expected to mourn their husbands forever, even if they were child brides who’d never met them. Notwithstanding the use of scripture to justify this arrangement, the most attractive of the widows, Kalyani (Lisa Ray), is expected to prostitute herself for the good of the group. The film slowly, very slowly, introduces us to the diverse women in the ashram, and to the particular customs of their social arrangement. The modern point of view is represented by Bollywood star John Abraham’s character, a university-educated fan of Gandhi who’s not only incredibly enlightened but seriously handsome to boot. He is therefore instantly attracted to Kalyani. For all that Memoirs of a Geisha represented a triumph of style over substance, it still had a more substantial plot than Water, which follows Mehta’s Fire and Earth in critiquing India’s rigid social structures. Water is sometimes beautiful to look at, but its romance is not touching when it’s supposed to be, and its portrayal of the culture fairly shallow. I did get into the story eventually, but until then it this was some slow-moving Water.

IMDb link

posted 8/21/13

Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (**1/2)

Albert Brooks plays Albert Brooks, on a government mission to study Indo-Pakistani humor. The amusing premise is stretched a bit too far to sustain a feature.

The premise is the most amusing thing about Albert Brooks’s latest, his first as a writer-director since 1999’s The Muse. Brooks stars as…Albert Brooks, an out-of-work comedian actor hired by the U.S. government to find out what people in India and Pakistan think is funny. Perhaps enemy hostiles can be won over with some disarming humor. Brooks has gotten the job, he’s told, because the government’s first few choices were working. Brooks knows comedy, but nothing about research. His methodology consists of asking people, “What makes you laugh?” and putting on a show and seeing what goes over. Brooks’s dour persona is something that probably either works for you or doesn’t, but this isn’t among his better films (which would include Lost in America and Defending Your Life). His ongoing concern about being able to fill a 500-page report was funny to me; so was Brooks’s reprisal of one of his old routines, the world’s worst ventriloquist. On the whole, though, I felt that a thin idea was being stretched too far, the way I did about two other show-biz comedies, Hollywood Ending and Bowfinger.

IMDb link

posted 9/17/13