On Lunchbox as symptom..

I put this up initially as a comment but then decided to give it a separate post..

The A O Scott piece on Lunchbox is very much on the money. Hardly anything I’d disagree with. I’d make this related point though which is not necessarily a criticism of the film. One could juxtapose this film with a certain Bombay middle cinema of the 70s or perhaps even moreso the Malayalam middle cinema (though it wasn’t ‘middle’ for its industry) of the 80s. The obvious difference is of course the fact that those films were still commercial efforts (either in a minor key or because they reflected the production limitations of a smaller industry) while Lunchbox has more auteurist (for want of a better term) ambitions. A small art-house effort though can sometimes end up making a fault out of its virtues if it insists too much on the precision of the ‘lyric’ moment. In other words this sort of film builds up a collection of such instances, it offers a genuine peek into the world it represents, it even leaves a certain resonance in the mind after the viewing has ended, but despite all this it can in certain ways lack that ‘sign’ of potentially greater meaning. The commercial film even when it is retrained always deals with ‘large’ subjects. What is compromised by way of subtlety is to a degree made up by this greater potency of meaning. This is partially achieved through a greater ‘affectivity’. The emotional registers of the work, the more obvious performances of stars, all conspire to achieve this even where a more sophisticated set of codes might be missing. So it’s a larger film masquerading as a little one while on the other hand there is a little film that is afraid of too much meaning. In one sense the latter fear is a justifiable one. The lyric moment can be destroyed if overlaid with too much meaning. Alternatively if the balance isn’t just right the moment itself might come across as obscure. Differently still meaning must not be too obvious in such a work but nor must affectivity make too direct a pitch at the viewer. Such a movie always involves an economy of precision far more than any commercial venture but the trick is that the carefulness on this score must not seem so to the viewer. Lunchbox might be that more ‘careful’ movie whereas Udaan (to cite a counterexample) is possibly the more ‘natural’ work. Or to use a different set of examples to illustrate the same point one of the reasons why so much foreign cinema from the 50s and 60s seemed so iconic even then was because even the seemingly smaller, less accessible subjects were treated as grand ones that would set a new course for the medium or at least introduce an important mutation. Leaving aside the reliance on stars or more obtrusive scores the cinematographic equation was differently constructed. As opposed to the claustrophobic shots of much of contemporary art-house cinema you had more expansive vistas where ‘national space’ could be utilized to a greater degree. Even in films with on the whole more compressed shots you had enough moments when the frame would simply be opened up to allow for that ‘grander’ perspective (which should not be confused with a bird’s eye view of some kind). A film shot in one Roman suburb somehow said something about the European condition or even the human condition whereas a film shot in Kuala Lumpur might simply be about a sordid chapter of globalization in one corner of the world which is then like any other along the same lines. Yet again, that older cinema still depended on a universal meaning whereas the contemporary kind chooses a fractured experience where meaning no matter how profound cannot go much further than the frame. One does not often see iconic urban sites in an art-house film today, it was hard not to have the opposite once upon a time. So even with someone like Antonioni when he’s shooting in a country-town he finds in the landscape a visual equivalent for a national-iconic that Fellini might more obviously locate in a major urban center. or when Bergman depicted all those bleak Swedish landscapes their very desolation combined with all of the director’s existential themes made the result somewhat ‘epic’. Not that this is the only possible answer. Sembene’s work for example is occasionally more ‘classic’ in this way but at other times he has little films that open up more to the viewer on account of a greater comic energy or the eccentric types that populate them. Once again Lunchbox isn’t a problematic film, it certainly does everything it attempts very well but whether the director ever lets the film breathe freely might be questioned. The obvious example here is Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s character who for a while seems to provide sparks to the narrative but who is overall kept ‘quarantined’ so as not to disrupt the film’s restrained pitch. Irrfan meanwhile is convincing here, certainly keyed into the film tonally, often fine, but also a bit burdened to appear natural in a signature way (Rangan probably mentioned this earlier and I agree with him). So you have the boxes being lifted with a bit too much care and slowness, the weariness a bit stagey at times and so forth. But in any case Lunchbox is in a long line of contemporary art-house cinema that is intent on highlighting compression in terms of narrative and framing and emotional response. Such a work is always busy trying to define in streamlined fashion the idea of a fine film and very rarely allowing itself the freedom to become one.