THE LUNCHBOX: OH, OH, OH, IT'S MAGIC, YOU KNOW?

DIRECTED BY: RITESH BATRA 

STARRING: IRRFAN KHAN, NIMRAT KAUR, NAWAZUDDIN SIDDIQUI, NAKUL VAID, YASHWI PUNEET NAGAR with BHARATI ACHREKAR, DENZIL SMITH and LILETTE DUBEY 

“Making 8 references to other movies is not writing a review,” a text message said, almost 24 hours after I had published my first ‘review’ of Ritesh Batra’s ‘The Lunchbox.’ You can read that ‘review’ here. Or you can scroll down a little and that will be the first thing you see after this attempted, almost independent take on ‘The Lunchbox’ where I shall pretend that it is the only film made on the planet, and that the joy of having watched ‘The Lunchbox’ had little to do with the fact that it reminded me of so many films and concepts I respected, if not completely liked. Additionally, I also believe that my obsession with the film’s themes of loneliness had rendered me aloof as well where I appear to have failed to grasp the bigger picture. With this second review of mine, I hope to fill all those gaps. 

Let me start with this one bone I didn’t pick to completion in my last review: its title. ‘The Lunchbox’ is an anglicized title for a film that manages to capture a little bit of rustic reality, even though it is mostly in the paradigm of borderline gimmickry. This does not render it insincere. The film exaggerates to make a point, but each exaggeration shows visibly the efforts of someone trying to sober it down. Then why ‘The Lunchbox’? Is this some ‘Ship of Theseus’ stunt of arming the movie with an over-simplified title that allows for a moral as well as socioeconomic high ground where one sits with a clipboard and makes observations? If there is a reason why I felt a little dissatisfied with the title, it is because I felt it could have incorporated some of the magic the film brims with. 

But then this is not to say ‘The Lunchbox’ is not a magical title. You see its relevance in the opening sequence. You see it every moment from then on. The opening sequence shows the Dabbawallahs of Mumbai engaged in the tedious task of transporting a gazillion lunchboxes to offices across the city. They pedal their respective cycles on a dotted line they have drawn for themselves inside their head. They pass their time singing the same song. In fact, the same camera angle is used to show this one particular Dabbawallah parking his bicycle below Ila’s apartment, following which there is a shot of a lunchbox kept at her doorstep – almost on the same place on the doormat, as though there is an X that marks the spot. In course of their unremarkable routine, they are magicians unaware of the weight of the material they carry to and carry back from the claims department in the insurance firm where a certain Saajan Fernandez (Irrfan Khan) works. 

‘The Lunchbox’ is thus both banality and an unconscious, gradual drift towards the remarkable, which also gets encapsulated in routine. To the Dabbawallah, the lives of Ila (Nimrat Kaur) and Saajan are no different from the lunchboxes he delivers every day. Even for Saajan and Ila, the transition from nonchalant widower or mind-numb housewife to “lover in despair” is almost unnoticeable. In making this shift, there is not a moment that they stray from the dull and dreary world of calculators, office files, kitchen sink, brinjals or the mid-day meal service, even. Confined to the same machine that seems to offer no respite, they find their ‘out’. Their lives then move slowly into a domain of magical reality, where – on the face of it – a lunchbox seems to have a conversation with them, trading witticisms in toneless narratives that offer a sort of Brechtian window into emotion. To add to that is Ila’s conversation with this unseen woman from upstairs. These are instances of ‘magic’ in the very reality that threatens to make prisoners of them; maybe even does. 

In all his attempts to communicate with this unknown letter-writer woman who is so disenchanted with her life that she can’t even bring herself to grieve for it, Saajan completely ignores and rejects the advances of this genuine and downright forthright individual by the name of Shaikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui, absolutely delightful). Middle-aged government officials are so trapped in their own heads they need a letter in a lunchbox to open themselves to meaningful companionship right in front of them. There is an absolutely stunning sequence in the middle of the film when Saajan, from being the man who literally ran away from this pest of an individual, backs him to the brink when he owns up for a mistake he had committed. What follows is a conversation between benefactor and beneficiary, perhaps the first time they ‘speak’ to each other. Shaikh, the man with his life ahead of him, speaks with such conviction that he is unapologetic even with his apologies, staring right into the eyes of a man who simply can’t stare back. Saajan has his fair share of things to say, some even in anger that he rediscovers when exasperation seems to not suffice anymore. But never does he look into Shaikh’s eyes. Him, Shaikh, the filmmaker and the viewer all know that his reading glasses are not the excuse. How has it happened that one gets so trapped within oneself that one cannot even look straight when talking to someone? This is blindfolds we’re talking about – not even blinkers. 

By distinguishing between Saajan and Shaikh, we are not distinguishing between people but draw attention to the time that has passed between them. For all we know, Shaikh could exactly be what Saajan would have been twenty years before. His marriage photograph will have been no different, save for the ceremony. The film actually goes a step ahead from this deduction and tries to tell us their lives are not so very different right now, let alone twenty years earlier. Shaikh is about to be married. Saajan fancies himself to have a ‘girlfriend’. This is not to say that he feels youthful. Quite the opposite, as illustrated in a lot of scenes. This is to say, however, that he is but in a loop that he has gotten accustomed to that ‘growing old’ hasn’t really struck and never will strike him. It will be but a moment when he stands in his bathroom smelling an old man in the shower that he will have to tell himself he is, after all, a man on the verge of retirement. 

‘The Lunchbox’ is a magic portal which enables the two deep sleepers in Saajan and Ila to wake up from their slumber and cope with a reality that seems to have redefined itself for them. Ila then hastens to go ahead and make sense of this amorphous relationship she shares with this letter-writer, even as she complains to him that her husband has an affair. Saajan shakes off his dead wife to give life a shot. These people unknowingly escape the realms of the sacrosanct as ‘morality’ takes a step back to guide them through this newly-erected structure, quite like the autorickshaw that takes Saajan through the city he barely knows anymore. Again, this is not to say that they have escaped the paradigm of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. This is to say they suddenly discover themselves in the middle of this newfound routine, where it is usual for them to pine for each other. This is not trivialization. This is reinforcement of the overarching metaphor of the lunchbox, where the very idea of ‘respite’ is yet another clueless confinement. 

You can visibly see the fight to keep away from abstraction, staying faithful to ground reality even as ‘The Lunchbox’ is extensively a film about concepts and, in a way, abstraction. The film employs both the easiest and the hardest devices to attempt the same. The easiest is the treatment – long shots, shaky camera, close-ups, shots that outlast their lifetimes in a desperate attempt to speak to the viewer. Yet it does not try to be picturesque. It does not pack the wonderment and marvel of an outsider in picturing various locales. What is attempted instead is the dryness and banality in an everyday observer’s tiresome commute, entertained by nothing but the coincidences of life like when the children who beg for alms on the train sing a song you had listened to on the radio the night before – a song from a film that has the same title as your name. To the viewer, it is a gimmick. But then it is an attempt on the writer’s part to offer the character what the film both gifts and denies him equally: respite. 

The hardest device is the acting. You can choose to brand a film with your pet concept, shoot postcards and ride on so-called intellectual merit. Or you can find the right people who would flesh your characters out enough at least so they don’t look like props. ‘The Lunchbox’ burdens its actors with the responsibility of having to keep their awkwardness, their confused state of suffering and the little moments when they break from these traps, both when they are by themselves, as well as in their interactions. It is hard to say which is more demanding. Nimrat Kaur is beautiful as the bewildered Ila who has to look like she has been taught how to feel but never could quite bring herself to. Irrfan Khan has not quite shed his swagger, and is almost typecast in a character who takes a higher ground throughout the film, even in self-deprecation. There are scenes where the star in him threatens to outshine the warm glow of the actor, but in all, Khan’s performance is pleasant rather than problematic. And Nawazuddin Siddiqui, the man who has played as many different roles as the films he has acted in, gives us yet another. 

‘The Lunchbox’ is a film that is sincere in its efforts to do justice to its own concepts as well as the socioeconomic realities it sets itself up in. It is an affecting film that gives the viewer a sense of validation for his/her own wait for life to happen; for magic that will occur to you. Even and especially at its quietest, most awkward moments, it speaks for you, your numbness, your predicament. It is not meant to be intellectualized, for it does not have the hand of a gourmet chef who wants a five-star rating on his recipe. It bears instead the care of a housewife who only cares for acknowledgement, whose face can both light up and fall at the sight of an empty lunchbox. Needless to say, she earns yours.

THE LUNCHBOX: "LONELINESS SIMULTANEOUSLY INCREASED AND DECREASED"

DIRECTED BY: RITESH BATRA 

STARRING: IRRFAN KHAN, NIMRAT KAUR, NAWAZUDDIN SIDDIQUI, NAKUL VAID, YASHWI PUNEET NAGAR with BHARATI ACHREKAR, DENZIL SMITH and LILETE DUBEY 

‘The Lunchbox’ was the second of my ‘coming to terms with things’ trilogy for today. The first one was the Josh Radnor film ‘Liberal Arts’ which I watched for the second time. And I made my way back from the cinema hall thinking I might have to revisit Fatih Akin’s ‘The Edge of Heaven’ later which would be the third film in that sequence. I might go ahead and watch it. I might not. I thought I’d write what I thought about ‘The Lunchbox’ down first. You can read what I thought about ‘Liberal Arts’ here, as written the first time I watched it. Not much has changed of what I felt about it. A little more clarity, a little more fondness. The academic observations have remained more or less the same. 

Surprisingly, the film I was most reminded of when I watched ‘The Lunchbox’ is neither of the films I have mentioned above. Nor was it ‘Manhattan’, Woody Allen’s biggest shot at optimism if he ever showed a little bit. The film I was most reminded of was this Marathi film called ‘Masala’ which was my ‘pick of the festival’ at OSIAN last year. ‘Masala’ captured a suburban couple’s pursuit of ‘the better life’, with a defining climactic moment where both of them separately find contentment in the realization that they have all they can ask for: each other. ‘The Lunchbox’ ends in mutual hopefulness (or a lack thereof) in the fact that the one they are looking for is looking for them as well. They might or might not find each other. Yet they find contentment in the fact that the wheels are in motion. 

But were the wheels ever idle? In answering this question, we find ourselves having to play by the presuppositions that either/all of these films bring to the table. Or rather, the overarching presupposition that the only thing palatable about life is flux. Not motion, but flux. This is best exemplified in Prof. Hoberg’s (Richard Jenkins) comment in ‘Liberal Arts’ when he says “Any place you don’t leave is a prison.” We are having to accord ourselves to this one presupposition that to be stuck in the same routine all these characters find themselves in is the same as being ‘trapped’. It is not hard to align oneself with that notion. On the one hand, it is pretty characteristic of my scheme of things, where I stand in life and my approach to life and living in general. On the other hand, there is also the “dirty little secret” (again, in Prof. Hoberg’s words) that no one in the world actually feels like an adult. You either come to terms with the fact that your life is and will continue to be unremarkable, or you refuse to do so. 

There is nothing wrong with Saajan Fernandez’ (Irrfan Khan, with less of his swagger) life. He is a widower claiming early retirement from his position as a clerk in the claims department of an insurance firm. He has no one for company. Does that make him lonely? I don’t think so. If anything, Saajan has reconciled with the fact that life can get no better. He is like Bruce Wayne in ‘The Dark Knight Rises’, having reached a point where life can be no different. He has reached his cruise altitude. All that is left is to go full-on autopilot: which is precisely what he does. 

This is one step beyond loneliness. To be lonely is to grieve that one isn’t getting one’s due in all of life’s joys and riches. Saajan has reconciled with the fact that life can be nothing but lonely. If loneliness is a limbo, his state of mind is one where he has pulled the plug already. His shrugging off of the pest in Shaikh (Nawazzudin Siddiqui, delightful) is not the reaction of the irritable working husband having to deal with stress, anxiety, school admissions, constipation and what not. He is more like Ebenezer Scrooge who’d say no to Christmas because it doesn’t let the dead decompose. 

One day, Saajan receives a lunchbox door-delivered by the famed dabbahwalahs of Mumbai. The box looks no different from the one he receives every day. But the food is not the same. It is not the aloo-gobi that so disgusts him. It is nothing remarkable either. The one distinguishing detail about this food is that it shows care – care that a loving wife shows her husband, which he now has intercepted. Care that wants nothing but acknowledgement for it to soldier on; for her to soldier on. Her name is Ila. He comes to know of it through a note she slips into the folds of a chapatti as she lets him know that the food she cooks for her husband is getting delivered to him by mistake. Saajan writes back. The conversation begins.
 

Ila (Nimrat Kaur, absolutely beautiful) has reconciled to a lifeless marriage. Remember the “old lady” Celine talks about in ‘Before Sunrise’ and how their lives are but her dream with a theme of regret? Well, Ila gets to speak to that old lady, actually. She calls her “Aunty,” a voice from above which, from giving cooking suggestions to life lessons, pretty much takes her through her whole interaction with Saajan. She even functions as a jukebox when she plays ‘Mera Dil Bhi Kitna Pagal Hai’ from the film ‘Saajan’ at request. She prods Ila to take the adventure as it beckons. Ila takes it up. This choice of hers is in sync with something Saajan says in the course of their correspondence. To paraphrase, he says one’s actions are rendered meaningless in the absence of someone to share it with. This is a revelation. In the life of someone who is only perhaps a little more affable than Gru in ‘Despicable Me’, this is a twist in the tale. 

It is in the intense feeling of loneliness that both these people begin their search for joy. Let me take another ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ example to clarify. A fellow prisoner in the cave tells Bruce Wayne that it is in acknowledgement of the fear of death that one finds purpose in living. Likewise, it is by acknowledging their loneliness that Saajan and Ila seek their mutual company. Life blossoms. Saajan looks “10 years younger” as Shaikh puts it. Even Shaikh, annoying as he is with his advances, seems lovable. Saajan and Ila wake up from their coma to see that things have changed. And they scramble and scrounge to fix it, finding contentment in their efforts; in the fact that they are, for once, “trying.” 

Life becomes precious with the knowledge that one can lose it. All distinctions between “want” and “need” are made at the onset of loss. Saajan is set to retire. Ila looks to move to Bhutan. Between them, they have a month. They could miss each other. They could meet. In the course of a month, they become important enough to each other that they would try, perhaps for as long as they live – much like how the night in ‘Before Sunrise’ was adequate for Jesse and Celine to want to meet again. ‘The Lunchbox’ thus resolves into Ila necessitating Saajan and vice-versa, despite constraints. Above the impossibility of it, there is also a very petty, subjective and yet crucial barrier. Saajan might not care for the fact that Ila is married, but is perturbed by the fact that he is much older than her. He sees in her a burning flame while he fancies himself to be a burnout, only to prove himself wrong as he shrugs it off and makes a sprint for it in the style of Woody Allen in ‘Manhattan’ as opposed to going the Josh Radnor way. 

The only problem I had with ‘The Lunchbox’ was the title. I’d have liked something on the lines of ‘The Edge of Heaven.’ The Guy de Maupassant sort of banal title, I felt, took away from the poetry. There were also a couple of instances when I felt ‘The Lunchbox’ took the ‘Ship of Theseus’ route of over-explaining. Thankfully, they were very few. For the most part, ‘The Lunchbox’ is subtle filmmaking, with incredibly human performances spearheaded by the stunning Nimrat Kaur. Amidst films that manipulate people’s vulnerability, ‘The Lunchbox’ is a gift. It is not a one-time feast that satiates the voracious film-viewer who thirsts to consume. It is magic in an everyday event. In Glen Hansard’s words, it is a gift that “falls right in your hands.” Extra delightful, when you least expect it.

BLADE-IN-CHEEK MADE BLUNT WITH OVERUSE

DIRECTED BY ANURAG KASHYAP 

STARRING: MANOJ BAJPAYEE, NAWAZUDDIN SIDDIQUI, RICHA CHADDA, HUMA QURESHI, JAIDEEP AHLAWAT, PIYUSH MISHRA, JAMEEL KHAN, ANURITA JHA, RAJKUMAR YADAV, ZEISHAN KHAN, VINEET KUMAR with REEMMA SEN and TIGMANSHU DHULIA 

The fact that I’m covering part I and II of Anurag Kashyap’s ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ together in my analysis is not to say that they’re to be considered together. They are, let me clarify, distinctively separate films and are intended to be so. I shall, however, stick to addressing both films in the same review for the very same reason that I opted to watch both films at a stretch that lasted about 320 minutes of my life – to save myself from the trouble of having to do the same damn thing twice in succession. And if that isn’t irony, then I don’t know what is.

Kashyap has always been one to look out for, what with his intricate sense in shot-taking, framing and storytelling in general, where he could energize a story with sheer treatment. He’s one of the rare Indian filmmakers who bends with the story rather than dictating it through sequences; in his films, I observe sequences that exist without pressure and not more than a slight motivation by the story, giving enough of an invitation for the viewer to engage and quite intimately at that. 

But where there’s entropy, there’s predictability as well – predictability which exceeds the confinement of style and signature. For someone as ambitious with his cinema, Kashyap is painfully limited, incredibly unimaginative; wasteful with his extravagance than wise. He could treat you to 5 and a half hours of an epic adventure and leave you with little felt. ‘Artificial’, I think, is a word that wouldn’t quite cut it, which ‘that Girl in Yellow Boots’ epitomized. In all ways, ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’, both parts I and II, are better films in the sense of comfort that the filmmaker has with the story he’s chosen to tell. If ‘that Girl in Yellow Boots’ was bad translation of a text that he didn’t understand, this gangster epic is a transliteration to colloquial text, read out by a bunch of skillful readers in a struggle with timing.

How Anurag Kashyap writes a script almost sounded like a range of Kalki Koechlin jokes that I conceived back when I watched her screw around with acting and writing in ‘that Girl in Yellow Boots.’ From what I heard (which could be my source’s own unromantic notion), he arms himself with a pack of cigarettes and alcohol and the cinema that he likes, and hugs them together at his desk to set the wheels in motion. This, in no way, is to accuse him of being a plagiarist, but it is, nonetheless, a fair idea on how his world shrinks to the space of a screen when he sits it down with a notebook and a pen. An effect that I’ve found to be conspicuous in what I’ve watched of him. 

Perhaps I have too much of bias where intertextuality is concerned. With it, I seem to demand a set of characters who are capable of it; who, at the end of the day, justify the intertextual element and give it a right to exist. Let me give you a not-so-remote example from ‘Ratatouille,’ which I happened to watch over lunch today as it was on TV. Anton Ego, the food-critic, orders for ‘perspective’ and a wine to match. Then he proceeds to ‘give perspective’ when the waiter is baffled and asks him to get something that would go well with a 1947 Cheval Blanc. Chef Skinner, waiting for Linguini to disappoint, says, in a gruff tone to match his disguise, that he’ll “have what he (Ego) is having.”

Think of the scene where Sardar Khan (Manoj Bajpayee) gets killed at the gas station. The reference needs no introduction; we’ve all, at some point in time, seen Sonny get knocked and rather ruthlessly at that, en route to sister Connie’s place in ‘the Godfather.’ At the end of the onslaught is a cinematic treat with three of the best things about the duology in place – sound, camera and performance – as Sardar crawls out of the wreck, gun in hand and holed like gauze with the amount of gunshots on him, and staggers around for a while before he collapses, a piece of Sneha Khanwalkar’s glorious soundtrack in the background, a song that’s potentially a favourite. The scene is as wacky as Mr. Blonde’s (Michael Madsen) ear-cutting in ‘Reservoir Dogs’ with ‘Little Green Bag’ playing and him doing a jig to it. Sardar Khan, who is kind of a blend of the hot-headed Sonny and the bum in Mr. Blonde, empowered by a subtle performance by Bajpayee, pulls it off. And yet I was left wondering if the scene should have been there, stretched beyond limit as it was, for the sole reason that it was the last shot of a film that was desperate for a heroic end.

I’ve always considered ‘the Godfather’ films to be a duology where I think the third film exists by itself – as a continuation and a build-up on existing characters than the ascent-to-power stories and a virtue-ethics course that the first two were. It was consistent as a confession where I thought judgement day had long gone by. Granted that, it seems too coincidental (and even more blatant) that ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ was proposed to be a two-part film that covered two generations of an ancestry with cameos by a third and a fourth. There’s as much patriarchy where religious custom comes as a stronghold, the men uphold as much of it as the women provoke, if not more. 

Speaking of women and provocation, we have two spread over the two films who ask for heroes of men they either wed or spawned. One is the acid-tongued Nagma (Richa Chadda), the tormented wife of Sardar Khan and mother of Danish (Vineet Kumar) and Faizal (Nawazuddin Siddiqui). The other is Sardar’s mistress Durga (Reemma Sen), an import from Bengal who is saved from one kind of prostitution to enter another. They both expect of their sons what they could never get from their husband. To Nagma, in a command of intense passion and devotion that wanted her husband alive, it is revenge. Durga, who never cast as much of a thought on devotion, demands legitimacy and appropriation of power. These things are usually expected of wives and mistresses if cinema’s taught us anything at all. Kashyap’s credibility, in both cases, rests on the strength of performances, and in that he, I felt, was in safe hands.

The third woman of any importance (and in no particular order) is Mohsina, who exists to intimidate Faizal, being as much of a knockout as Huma Qureshi’s debut performance makes her to be – tall and almost smiling and with eyes that speak of mischief. In her I see an exciting new actor along the lines of favourites like Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence. Faizal would have to rattle the whole house to get to rattle her, but Qureshi’s Mohsina just needs to sing her pet lyric, one that was used, to my dismay, as much as punch-line in a John Woo movie. 

That these men are defined by the women in their lives is interesting to note. Sardar finds other women because he’s ashamed to face his wife. Faizal plays passive-aggressive in a relationship he holds in the palm of his hands and knows it as well. It also correlates with his fluctuation between strength and vulnerability in a life that goes with the ganja he does. Danish, to complete the picture, is the emotional fool not unlike Sonny Corleone who misses the toll-booth/petrol-pump because his father gets there first. 

Definite (Zeishan Khan), in that way, is arbitrariness – the dotted line on which the film is drawn as the structured end-product. He has no boundaries and is almost unguessable, a fact that irked me in that it was too much in convenience of the writers and director. Definite, in essence, is the undefined and thus is a play of irony. He has the ambiguity of a Catherine Tramell where there’s seduction in not knowing when he times his strike. Or that’s how it’s supposed to be, except that it’s here that I’d take Ebert’s track. Suspense in excess keeps the viewer out than in. It’s exciting in the eve of ample information, wasteful when there isn’t. But I have to admit that the beauty of Definite is that he isn’t even a suspense to begin with. He is, so to say, the Chekhov’s gun of the duology, a realization that asked for a better actor even though it worked in that he was not as conspicuous. 

I’m aware that, up until now, I’ve said more good things than bad things about a film I said I didn’t like – if this was an argument, I'd have lost it already. ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ does dig deep into concepts and I can’t comment on its factual elements, having watched the films like I was a native of Cannes and like I caught it there at the festival than right here in New Delhi, where my alienation came right down to the fact that I need subtitles to understand. This also puts me in a bad position to judge the film on grounds of authenticity on how it captured the region and the dialect and if or if not the performances cohered with the same. However, it wasn't new to see Kashyap’s resourcefulness in capitalizing on history and pop-culture, something I had a sneak-preview in ‘Dev D’ where he made a story out of an MMS scandal that went around a while back. 

I think my fundamental problem with the films (put together) was George Simmons’ dissatisfaction with his own performance on stage in ‘Funny People.’ In his words, “it wasn’t a pee, it was a shit – it took too long.” And it left me with too little, to top that. ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ is mock-Godfather with Tarantino wackiness and a breath of Kashyap's humour that’s crude, distracting and oddly-timed which works when not in excess. There’s an ingenuous sequence where the set of brothers and friends plan and execute a killing that’s almost like untying and tying a knot on your kurta with a phone on each ear and too much cheek to spare. That scene was sheer brilliance. Also amusing are the conversations between Ramadhir Singh (Tigmanshu Dhulia, excitingly subtle) and son J.P. who can’t do enough to impress his father. 

Too many characters with too much intersection and with emphasis on too little – makes me want to ask a lot of questions, but I wished to ask just the one. Why ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’? It’s neatly executed, well-crafted and largely entertaining; it’s not 'old wine in new bottle.' It’s new wine in an old bottle that reeks of nostalgia, raises the bar and tastes cheap in the end, contrary to the labels stuck on it – ‘the Godfather’ duology and the Tarantino handbook. Kashyap stands the weight of the films’ hefty performances (by Siddiqui, Bajpayee, Dhulia, Chadda and Qureshi) on a thin crust of soul without a core to support. It’s fancy blade-work in a gunfight that he initiated in the first place - tiresome, futile, but amusing. Or, in his own words, it hits the ‘tangent’ and not the ‘perpendicular’ in a pepper-spray routine than a shrapnel-packed explosion that it tries to be.

ARE YOU?

DIRECTED BY ANIRBAN DHAR 

STARRING: NANDITA DAS, JUHI CHAWLA, MANISHA KOIRALA, SANJAY SURI, RADHIKA APTE, RAHUL BOSE with PURAB KOHLI, SHERNAZ PATEL, ARJUN MATHUR, ABHIMANYU SINGH, POOJA GANDHI, ANURAG BASU and ANURAG KASHYAP 

Anirban Dhar a.k.a. Onir’s ‘I Am’ is a collage of four inter-connected stories that, thankfully, do not add up to a mission statement as part of a bigger picture. The individual stories, however, try, where lesser the conspicuousness of effort, the more likeable the film ended up being. That was how the equation worked. 

The first segment is called ‘Afia’ and follows Afia (Nandita Das) through the fall of her marriage that rattles her enough that she decides to have herself impregnated artificially and goes on a search for the right person to do the trick. In the waiting room, she strikes an awkward sort of conversation with Suraj (Purab Kohli), who looks a tad too old to be a (medical) student. Kohli appears to have been in his early thirties (he is, presently, 33) when the movie was filmed, so it’s the right kind of hunch, I come to learn, contrary to belief. I understand why he needed to look more mature, but I felt he couldn’t pull off the confusion and the innocent romance that could be attributed to, say, a 22 year old in the same position. 

Juhi Chawla, who makes a brief appearance as a friend and plot-propeller in ‘Afia’, has a segment of her own in ‘Megha’, where she plays a Kashmiri Pandit who takes a very brief trip back home to compare suffering with Rubina (Manisha Koirala), a childhood friend of hers. Amidst tension and the whole backhandedness that constituted almost the entirety of the visit, we barely get a hang of the fact that these two women were, once upon a time, actually good friends. In one scene, Onir actually had to resort to a voiceover by pre-pubescent girls to stress upon the fact that these people were, indeed, capable of innocence, many moons back. The segment ends with a ‘Before Sunset’ sort of blame-game where the Muslim woman has the last word. It was one of those moments that you like more for what it did to you than what it reminded you of. 

‘Abhimanyu’ gets the pride of position and is the strongest segment, cinematically, where it also looks to be most sincere. If there is an allegory, I did not see it (on Abhimanyu as the son of Arjuna in the ‘Mahabharata’). Nevertheless, if there were a contest, it would have turned out most imaginative, best acted and best shot amongst the lot. 

 In ‘Abhimanyu’, Sanjay Suri plays Ashish a.k.a. Abhimanyu with a story behind the name change and his utilitarianism. As a child, Abhi (as he is called) had been repetitively abused (sexually) by his stepfather Vinay (Anurag Kashyap in an exciting little cameo) in the absence of his Mother who constantly went out of town. Helplessness turns to manipulation as Boy becomes Man, finding himself in a game that he knows exactly how to play. “He wanted to marry a single woman with a little boy,” is what he comes up with when he finally breaks the ice with his Mother, a horrifying little detail where the woman would, subsequently, have to live with the fact that she has, to some extent, lived an extensive lie. 

What is arguably the strongest portion in a film that epitomized discontent also had me disappointed the most as a consequence of unnaturally raised stakes. ‘Abhimanyu’ had two exceptional human beings in Natasha (Radhika Apte, breathtaking) and Abhi’s mother Asha (Shernaz Patel) in whom the film went skin-deep at best. On the one hand, we have the woman who loves Abhi unconditionally, on the other is the one who loved her husband in much the same way – with complete acceptance, no holds barred. These are incredible people that the film is diplomatic about, the filmmaker – as utilitarian as Abhi himself. 

The last section has Rahul Bose and Arjun Mathur meet-cute as Jai and Omar. Jai comes across Omar peering on top of ‘the Times’ at him where he’s real quick to get the drift and drift along as well. ‘Milk’ is the choice for a movie for the evening, where they settle for dinner and a drive instead, parking at a place for one of the rarest of scenes in an Indian film – of men kissing and rather passionately. Ankle-deep, barely, and they’re pulled out by a Cop (Abhimanyu Singh) who looks like he’s swallowed Chris Cooper essence from ‘American Beauty.’ Homosexuality had still not been legalized in the country, which means Jai, the corporate among the two, has to pay. And how? 

‘I Am’ is, like I said, a collection of four inter-connected stories. There is much deliberation in the fluidity of characters across stories; in the links that entitle them to do so. There is also subtlety in that deliberation, at the same time. It works. And yet, much like every other experience I have with an Indian film, I found myself estranged. It’s not Brechtian mastery in play, but bad taste in decision. I am minimalist when it comes to background scores, and I simply cannot take distractions in form of song. The music is good, but I felt it was unnecessary. I’d rather hear the wind speak than have a violin to describe figurative turbulence. 

‘I Am’ is a story about four people that should’ve covered eight. But an eight-person film would ask for emphasis on sixteen. It’s like Ebert’s ‘Hamlet’ analogy – on how the Extra would call it a story about an Undertaker who meets a Prince. In a death of perspective, ‘I Am’ keeps its second-bests at sea. What could’ve been a great film tones down to ‘sensible Bollywood’ with Rahul Bose and his eight-pack abs. It’s a new kind of ‘fancy’, lesser stressed.