Ritesh Batra | Dabba (The Lunchbox) / 2013, USA 2014

the right person in the wrong place

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ritesh Batra and Rutvik Oza (screenplay), Ritesh Batra (director) Dabba (The Lunchbox) / 2013, USA 2014

 

The 2013 Indian film The Lunchbox is a likeable film that grew out of an idea of director Ritesh Batra to do a documentary on the famous lunchbox delivery system of Mumbai, where lunches, cooked by wives and restaurants, are regularly delivered just before lunch by dabbawala, highly efficient street-runners who deliver up the lunches to office workers throughout the city.

 

     Spending time with the dabbawala, however, Batra began to hear tales and personal stories that  recounted errors and mistakes in the system, which helped the director reconceive his tale in the form of an epistolary cinema, in which one morning, suddenly without explanation, a senior worker, Saajan Fernadez (Irrfan Khan), a widower about to retire, is delivered the wrong food. Instead of the standard cauliflower-based, over-salted cooking of the restaurant from which orders his meals, he receives a deliciously-flavored series of dishes cooked by a young married woman, Ila (the beautiful Nimrat Kaur).

     Ila and her husband, incidentally, are not getting on so well, even though they share a young daughter, and when the pack of lunch dishes is returned completely licked clean, and Ila’s husband describes his lunch as “good enough,” she realizes that her special lunch—concocted with special ingredients and suggestions by Ila’s aunt, who lives above them—has gone astray.

 

     The next morning, after cooking an even more special lunch, she adds a note, explaining the mixup, and thus begins a series of short letters, at first just filled with bits of information and advice, but gradually opening up, particularly in the case of Ila, to reveal aspects of her personal life. Before each of them know it, their daily correspondence has grown into a kind of intimate conversation, in which Saajan reveals his loneliness, as Ila admits that it appears that her husband Rajiv (Nakul Vaid) is having an affair.

       To reiterate the changes going on in the mind of the less loquacious Saajan, the writers and director introduce a likeable if inept future replacement for Saajan and his job, a young man Shaikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) who is ready to please his trainer and in love with a young woman whom he is about to marry. He is also a good cook. Yet, at first, Saajan entirely ignores him, refusing to teach him or train him in the job. After a few days, however, Skaikh’s eager face and Saajan’s increasing pleasure and even slightly exciting sexual correspondence, opens him up to actually listen (in both Hindu and English) to the young man’s hopes and own joy of life. Bit by bit, he allows Skaikh to take over some of his duties—all of which ends disastrously, when it is discovered that, after long years of spotless bookkeeping, the files have gone terribly awry. Refusing to blame Skaikh, however, Saajan corrects the books and even accepts the orphan Skaikh’s request to stand as his witness in Skaikh’s marriage to his young lover.

       As Ila’s hospitalized father dies, and her husband continues to distance herself from her, the epistolary relationship between her secret food lover and her becomes even more important in her life, and, finally, she requests to meet him in one of her favorite restaurants. Sadly, Saajan fails to show up, and the next morning she sends him am empty food box which, when returned that afternoon, explains that he had, indeed, been there, but that, when he saw the beautiful young woman before him, he realized that as an older man closing down his life, it would be wrong to continue such an illicit relationship. The tender missles of Ila had deluded him into believing, for a short while, that he was young again. 

      Determining to meet him, nonetheless, Ila drills the dabbawala, insisting that he has been delivering to the wrong man, and tracks Saajan to his office, only to be told that he has quit his job and moved to Nashik.

       In the very next scene, Saajan returns to Mumbai, now determined to seek out Ila; Ila, almost as in an O. Henry story, has, in turn, sold her jewelry and moved with her daughter to Bhutan, a location which Saajan had previously suggested to where they might escape. Whether these two lonely and lovely souls ever do find each other, we never know. But we can presume, by the tone of this soulful “comedic” work, that neither of them will ever hook up with each other, and what might have been at first perceived as a light-hearted “mix-up” has been transformed into a serenade of lost opportunities and love.

       Perhaps that most poignant aspect of Batra’s film, at least for me, is the fact that the over eager and incompetent men and women like Shaikh and his young wife, as well as Ila’s philandering husband Rajiv, all find love and live life quite fully, while the honest, capable, and truly nurturing figures such as Ila and Saajan are left on the outside, lonely and joyless, a theme reiterated through the film as night after night, Saajan is seen quietly drinking and smoking upon his balcony as he looks down, almost like a voyeur, upon a family enjoying their joyous dinner below. Ila too, in her daily chores of cooking and washing, seems completely isolated from world around her, despite Mumbai’s busy streets, a woman, whom we fear, may turn out like her Auntie, trapped in her room by a man who stares incessantly at a ceiling fan, forced to change his diapers. It is almost as if their competence and special gifts keep them from enjoying the fruits of their behaviors. To give freely of oneself does not mean that the world will give anything back. All one can do is to continue to true to one’s own nature, and perhaps even the recognition that someone once noticed those special qualities is all the reward one can expect. Perhaps the dabbawala, who defensively argues that there can have been no mistake in his delivery, has handed up Ila’s lunchbox to right person, after all, while putting it down in the wrong place.

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2014

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (April 2014).

Michelangelo Antonioni | Le amiche (The Girlfriends) / 1955

the woman from rome

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michelangelo Antonioni, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, and Alba De Cespedes (writers, based on the story “Tra donne sole” by Cesare Pavese), Michelangelo Antonioni (director) Le amiche (The Girlfriends) / 1955

 

Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le amiche, from 1955, does not have the deep intensity or for that matter the complexity of his great trilogy, L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse of the 1960s; but as The New York Times critic A. O. Scott noted about a 2010 revival of the film, it is, nonetheless, “enchanting and strange.”

     I’m not sure I’d use those exact terms. L’Avventura, when I reviewed it a few years ago, did not appear as experimental and unconventional when I reviewed it a few years ago, as it clearly was to the critics of the day. And this film, based on a Cesare Pavese story, reads, at times, more like an updating of George Cukor’s 1939 film, The Women than something like Blowup, although the latter is also based on a short story, and features, like this film, fairly well-off and sophisticated arts people.

      Yet here, unlike Cukor’s chestnut, there are men, with whom the five central women friends—Clelia (Eleonora Rossi Drago), Rosetta (Madeleine Fischer), Momina (Yvonne Furneaux), Neme (Valentina Cortese), and Mariella (Anna Maria Pancani)—fall in and out of love.

      Unlike The Women, who are intelligent but spend most of their loves caring for their bodies, attending fashion shows, and most of all gossiping about one another, this small coven of accidental “friends” are closer to closet feminists, particularly Clelia, who has come to Turin (her hometown) from Rome to open up a new salon like the one she has in the capitol city.

       The locals, Rosetta and Neme, are in love with a handsome, but failed artist, Lorenzo (Gabriele Ferzetti). Although currently married to Neme, he has painted a portrait of Rosetta, who has fallen in love with him through the act, and hence, given the impossibility of their love, begins the melodrama by attempting to kill herself; fortunately for the film, she does not succeed, and instead gains a new friend Clelia who happens to be staying in a hotel room next to hers.

       Momina, married, lives in an open relationship, mostly with architect Cesare (Franco Fabrizi)   who is too slowly rebuilding Clelia’s new shop. So too Momina’s protégé Mariella would love to develop a relationship with him.

       The more down-to-earth Clelia, meanwhile, falls for Cesare’s working-class assistant, Carlo (Ettore Manni), but quickly realizes that she has long ago moved out of her own working-class roots and that if they truly became a couple realizes, as she tells him, “We would just fight about furniture.”

        Perhaps the film’s strangest scene is when this entire group takes off a day to travel to the beach, where they play out some of their fears and frustrations, Clelia being worried that Rosetta may attempt suicide once more, and Mariella attempting to seduce Cesare, while all around them couples appear to be having sex in the shadows of the beach shacks and dunes.

       It is a brilliantly paced scene, languid yet brittle with tension. And suddenly what might have seemed to be friendship and love turns out to be a kind of existentialist drama wherein each figure must face her inner self. None of the people, we now perceive, really belongs with the others. And despite some of their career successes, none of them is truly fulfilled.

       Moreover, as the “girlfriends” gradually perceive, the three men in their lives are simply not reliable, as the women come to realize that they are much stronger and able to deal with life than the males around them.

        There are parallels and foreshadowing’s here of Fellini, in whose films it is almost always the women who ground their lovers and explore more adventurous worlds than the males to whom they are linked. One need only think of Giulietta Masina in his Juliet of the Spirits.

        The woman from Rome finally gets what she wants, a fine new salon, after which quickly hikes back for where she’s come. Neme is offered a show of her ceramics in the US. Momina, a strong and dominant woman, will clearly survive. Only Rosetta, the previous survivor, cannot assimilate her mistakes and finally succeeds in committing suicide, and it appears that Clelia alone truly cares about the young woman in the next room who has died. Unfortunately, the ever-flirtatious Mariella must still come to terms with the truth. 

        

Los Angeles, December 2, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2019).

 

Henri-Georges Clouzot | L'Assassin habite au 21 (The Murderer Lives at Number 21) / 1942

calling cards for murder

by Douglas Messerli

 

Henri-Georges Clouzot and Stanislas-André Steeman (screenplay), Henri-Georges Clouzot (director) L'Assassin habite au 21 (The Murderer Lives at Number 21) / 1942

 

L'Assassin habite au 21 was Henri-Georges Clouzot’s first feature film, and the 4th movie he wrote for the Nazi-run studio Continental Films—a company created, in part, to replace banned American films. Fortunately, there are no obvious Nazi propagandistic elements in this work, and some critics have observed subtle satiric moments poking fun at the Germans.

       The subject here is murder described in a comic way that almost reminds one of The Thin Man series, particularly since its central characters, the police detective Wens (Pierre Fresnay) unintentionally teams up with his wife, the hilarious would-be opera singer, Mila Malou (Suzy Delair) to solve a series of city murders committed by a man or woman who leaves behind, with each killing, a card declaring it is the work of “Durand.”

       The Mayor, the Chief of Police, and others are naturally frustrated that there seem to be utterly no clues as the identity of Durand, and demand the Wens solves the case within a few days or he will be without a job.

       At a would-be opera tryout, the over-the-top Mila Malou—a woman who not only sings her songs a bit higher than they are written and who is more than a little neurotic—is told by the opera impresario that even if she were to sing well, he could not hire her because she has no “name.”

       Determined to quickly become famous, Mila determines to outdo her husband by being the first to discover Durand’s whereabouts, but her actions, driving without lights, immediately land her in jail until Wens can show up to claim her as his wife.

       Meanwhile, Wens gets a break when an ex-con, now gone straight and working as a second-hand furniture dealer, purposely gets arrested—through a hilariously put-down of a local policeman as he sits perched on a streetlight—so that he can tell Wens privately that he found newly printed cards in the drawer of a desk recently sold to him by someone living at a boarding house at 21 Avenue Junot.

      Going in search to the murderer, Wens tells his wife he is traveling, leaving a sealed letter behind in case he doesn’t return.

       He arrives at the boarding house dressed as a priest and there meets a cast of lunatics that might be at home in Arsenic and Old Lace: a bird-tweeting doorman and servant, a slightly dotty landlady, a man who makes dolls with no faces, an ex-soldier who spouts his detestation of mankind and who sees Durand as a kind of hero, a magician who sleeps in a coffin and keeps making things disappear, a would be lady-writer whose manuscripts are perpetually rejected, and blind ex-boxer and his nurse who appear to be having an affair. Each of them is strange and it seems that any one of them might be Durand.

       The fun of this film, a bit like Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, lies in trying to outguess Wens and—when his wife unexpectedly shows up as a new guest in the house—Mila in determining which one is the murderer. Even Wens seems, once he has settled on the mean ex-soldier, mistaken. For although the arrested man finally admits to being Durand, police are faced with another murder with Durand’s calling card hanging from the corpse’s neck.

      They arrest the dollmaker only to be served up with another body, and Wens goes on a chase to find the magician performing a new act, which still does not reveal his guilt. Indeed, his life is now threatened as the 13th and perhaps final murder.

      As anyone who has read my hundreds of reviews knows, I always reveal the entire plot, so if you’ve not seen the movie and want the joy of attempting to figure the murderer out for yourself, you should stop here.

       The revelation that Durand is not one person but all three of the men in the boarding house working in tandem might suggest that it takes an army, such as the German Nazis, to kill and rob so many people. In fact, these three have been covering for one another all their lives, saving each other from school expulsion and other scrapes they encountered as children. In short, they grew in a culture of deceit that might even suggest the German nation. And in the end, after having captured Wens, they each claim the right to murder him.

     Yet, this is after all a comedy, and at the last moment, the police, with Mila in the lead, rush into the warehouse where the three Durands have trapped the detective, in order to save his life. How they discovered his whereabouts is never quite explained. But it hardly matters, for Mila has saved her husband. Perhaps now she can have the baby she desires and, after performing so significantly to the boarding house audience, give up her musical aspirations.

     This charming who-done-it is a strange offering from a Nazi film company given that it so imitates British and American cinema.

 

Los Angeles, June 8, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2019).

Stephen Cone | The Wise Kids / 2011

different ways of loving and believing

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stephen Cone (screenwriter and director) The Wise Kids / 2011

Director Stephen Cone’s gentle tales, which tell of teenagers growing into maturity before the eyes of their elders, are, at heart, films of ideas; yet they don’t seem at all to preach, even though they are often located within tightly-knit religious, particularly Baptist, communities. Usually, when encountering any literary or cinematic work about true believers, the writers and directors take stands either for or against. But Cone has the grace and lightness of touch to let his characters speak for their own views, presenting a broad range of different viewpoints without demonizing and judging any of them. It is this director’s fairness (although he often does have a few very narrow-minded figures) that makes his films seem so magical. And even non-believers, such as I am, are attracted to his work.

    The other day I watched one of his early films, The Wise Kids, in two entire viewings over two days, and I realized just how subtly his “ideas” were presented. In this film three students, one a church organist and drama leader, and the other, a slightly older, perhaps lesbian girl, ostracized from her grandmother’s love while still living in her house, stand in for a wide range of viewpoints, while still all deeply embraced by the religious community in which they were raised.

     The most daring of them is the preacher’s daughter, Brea (Molly Kunz), who, as a senior in school, is suddenly beginning to question her religious teachings. As she puts it to her best friend Tim (Tyler Ross), “We might have believed whatever our parents taught us.” In short, she is arguing that, in part, children are, in following their parent’s teachings, in some sense brainwashed. And if they don’t later begin questioning those beliefs they will be again imposed on their own children as well. Clearly that is the case with their classmate, Laura (Allison Torem), an overeager believer who prays to God with words such as “fabulous” and “awesome.”

     Although Tim is less disenchanted with his beliefs than Brea, arguing that he pretty much came to his beliefs by himself, he is having his own difficulties with his religious convictions because he has discovered that he is gay.

     It’s clear that all the girls in his school, represented here only by Brea and Laura, find him cute. But a casual question from a visitor to the community, “Is he gay?” signals these young people that Tim is, indeed, homosexual, bringing Laura to the ask the question directly and to promise to email him a list of Bible passages that prove it is a grave sin. Tim blandly suggests she do that, making it clear, despite his own insistence that it is simply something he is trying to work it out with prayer and thought, that he is comfortable within his own skin. And it is that self-assuredness that makes this character so truly likeable. Soon after, he tells his working-class father that he is gay, a widower who accepts the fact quite affably. But when Tim’s younger brother hears of it, he is anything but accepting, and Tim, who has begun to bond with Brea, calls her, suggesting he needs to get away.

      Meanwhile, Brea, much loved by the elderly busy-body in the church, Ms. Powell, has become friendly with her granddaughter, Cheryl (Sadie Rogers)—a self-admitted non-believer, and the two take her along to a clearly mixed gay, lesbian, and freewheeling local bar in their small community. There, Brea lets her hair down by wildly dancing, Tim finds a handsome young man with whom he passionately dances, and Cheryl is approached by another woman. The trio has found their true spiritual home.

      But the other major figure in this tender film, the drama coach Austin (played by the director himself) is double-locked into that closed society by his marriage and his sincere love of his wife Elizabeth, and the growing recognition that he, too, is gay. We recognize his emotional state by a hand left perhaps just a second too long on a student’s shoulder, a clumsily attempted kiss of Tim at a party, and his inability to have sex with the wife whom he, nonetheless, loves.

      Brea, who was preparing, like Laura, to attend a local religious college, has quietly applied to NYU and suddenly is accepted, while Tim had planned all along to attend the New School. Understandably, Laura feels rejected, but we also know she will find a local boy to settle down with who shares her religious fervor. Tim and Laura will surely face rockier but far more varied futures.

      A return home after their first semesters, brings together the young trio, who perform again in Austin’s dramatization of the Christ’s birth. And during that visit, as Austin meets with Tim, the older man admits that he is gay. In a reversal of the usual roles, the younger consoles the elder with a deep hug, knowing surely that the elder is doomed to either remain in the closet or to destroy the entire life he has made for himself. It’s clear that he will chose the former, mouthing during the performance, “I love you,” to his wife, she responding “I love you too.”

      What this director shows us, time and again, is that love can take many, many shapes, even within closed societies. There are no monsters here, just human beings attempting to live out their lives the best they can, some within greater confines than others. The kids are wiser simply because they have attempted to work out the definitions of their world while they were young. For poor Austin, we realize, it is too late, and we can only deeply sympathize with the pain and suffering he will have to embrace for the rest of his life. But then, we also know that the man performing Austin was a “wise kid,” who made his way in a different direction than his preacher father might have wished.

 

Los Angeles, February 16, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2018).

 

Cris Derek Van | Your Face in December / 2023

ghosts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cris Derek Van (screenwriter and director) Your Face in December / 2023 [11 minutes]

 

Again appropriating images from many sources, this time including photos by Robert Mapplethorpe and others, Chicago based Asian artist Cris Derek Van tells a story in Your Face in December about gay a love between Fabio and Sebastian.

    In this work, except for lovely homoerotic gay photos of men, the director does away almost entirely with images, using many of his cinematic frames for words only, this time spoken in Spanish and translated on screen into English.

    The language is again highly romantic and poetic, with phrases such as: “Your voice, your eyes, your hands, your lips. Our silences, our words.”

    The two obviously cannot keep their minds off of one another, talking, we soon realize, after at least one of the deaths. The love is retained in the mind, the body—both of which strangely in this cold storage romance, not longer exist. They are ghosts.

     And despite their romantic declarations, with many statements of silence and eternity such as— “Like an eternity of coming to understand myself and my budding desires, when I look at your face in December, I come to understand. Alone, but not sad, smiling, but not happy, walking but not moving somewhere.”—we quickly realize that these figures in space no longer exist together.

     Nothing is explained about their coming together or what happened between them except love. But by the final frame 11 minutes into the film we hear a gunshot, forcing us to realize that either one or both of them have been killed, either by suicide or mutual sacrifice.

     Loss is again the center of Derek Van’s film. Yet, strangely this time we feel only the loss, no significant nostalgia or sorrow since these were ghosts—their now empty language dominating the screen and their existence—before the film even began.

 

Los Angeles, July 20, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).