The Lunchbox

This delightful thought provoking film is sure to satisfy your craving for socially relevant Indian cinema. You won’t find any musical numbers or melodramatic love stories here. Much like the excellent Mumbai’s King (2012), the film makers are showing us a more gritty genuine and un-romanticized side of India.

This charming gentle film follows Saajan (Irrfan Khan), an aloof widower about to retire from his office job, and Ila (Nimrat Kaur), a lonely neglected housewife trying to rekindle her marriage by cooking traditional Indian dishes with spices and love.

Ritesh Batra’s unique first feature film is a quiet sensitive love story set against the backdrop of Mumbai’s dabbawallahs, or lunchbox wallas, as they pick up and deliver hot lunches prepared by the wives of office workers to their husbands working in the city. 

Mumbai’s daily lunchbox delivery system is so complex and reliable that it’s been studied by Oxford scholars and is estimated to be so accurate that dabbawallas make less than one mistake in 6 million deliveries.

Office loner and widower Saajan is a bit of an anti-social scrooge when we first meet him.  When introduced to a new employee and asked to train him to take his place before his retirement, he uses his reputation as a cold uncaring stoic to avoid him. 

The film features a fascinating look at the daily routine of Mumbai’s dabbahwallas while going about their job of gathering lunch pails from various residences and cycling, walking and taking trains across the city to office districts personally delivering each lunch to their respective destinations, returning the empty lunchboxes to their homes in the afternoon.

When Saajan’s lunchbox arrives at his workplace he’s surprised at the sudden improvement in the quality of his food, which he orders from a street side eatery. What he doesn’t realize is that he has been getting Ila’s home prepared meal meant for her husband. 

Irrfan Khan’s subtle stone face expressions have quietly been making a huge impact in Western cinema over the past few years with roles in some of my favorite highly acclaimed films like Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (2007), Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (2012).

We get to watch as Ila prepares her aromatic home cooked food while seeking sage advice about the ingredients of love from her upstairs neighbor. She communicates her feelings through her recipes and something begins to stir inside Saajan, who starts communicating with this mysterious house wife through notes he leaves in the empty lunch bag. 

Much of the story is communicated through non-verbal facial expressions and body gestures, which gives the feeling of being witness to very private and intimate moments where no dialogue is necessary to see exactly what’s going through their minds. 

As they start to open up to each other about their feelings and frustrations, the notes get longer and Saajan slowly starts to become more compassionate to his new replacement.

The Lunchbox is a meditative study in loneliness in one of the world’s most densely populated cities and shows us that people who crave love and affection will find it when they are willing to open their hearts to it.

JP

Tim's Vermeer

What if the 17^th century Dutch master painter Johannes Vermeer, renowned as one of the greatest artists in the world, was actually a fraud who was perhaps not an artist at all but a very talented tinkerer and manipulator of light?

In his documentary Tim's Vermeer, Tim Jenison has taken this extraordinary idea - that’s been kept secret for 350 years - and put his extensive talents as an inventor and technologist to convincing use in order to prove that hypothesis. 

It’s not exactly a secret among art historians that Vermeer may have used optical tools popular at the time to create his near photographic quality paintings. But Jenison had the tools and the know-how, not to mention the dedication, to set out on an eight year journey to put this argument to rest. He found compelling evidence that, in fact, Vermeer did use primitive types of devices called a Camera Obscura to aid him in creating his masterpieces.

The film is a chronicle of Jenison's painstaking efforts to make the most compelling case to prove Vermeer's use of optical tools by attempting to recreate one of his paintings using the exact same techniques and materials that would have been used and were readily available to artists in Holland at that time. 

Jenison’s astonishing revelations, while on this obsessive adventure, makes for a fascinating documentary about not only techniques used by 17^th century artists but also little known historical and scientific facts and details about painting, how our eyes see light, optics and the art world in general.

Tim's Vermeer was produced and directed by the magician duo Penn and Teller, who have a long-standing friendship with Jenison. I was just as drawn into the mystery as Tim was, as he tries to answer intriguing questions about how this artist worked and the conditions in which he created his masterpieces.

The only real evidence that exists today is the paintings themselves, which are actually documents revealing the effects of optical materials in very subtle ways. The way that Jenison discovers these clues is by actually recreating one of Vermeer’s paintings using those very same optical techniques. But he goes much further than that, making and mixing the paint from scratch using the same tools and materials that were used Vermeer's time.

The results are truly astonishing, especially when you realize that Tim Jenison is not a painter or an artist. This documentary has to be seen to be believed and you will be amazed. It puts the artist Vermeer and his work in a whole new light and should force the art world and historians to reexamine these paintings.

If it turns out to be true, which seems to be very much the case, Vermeer was practically painting a projected image in front of him using mirrors and lenses, so that it was possible to match light and color with striking precision. Once you know the technique, this can be achieved by anyone with enough patience and the inclination. Vermeer's paintings can be seen not only as art, but as precursors to the photograph.

Whether or not you are convinced by Tim Jenison's intriguing theories, this documentary will open viewer’s eyes to the stunning creations of two people living hundreds of years apart, who both dedicated their lives to give us the truest vision of the world around them. 

JP