If The Lunchbox,
writer/director Ritesh Batra’s first film, were an American, not an Indian,
production, it would be a romantic comedy of the silliest degree. Kate Hudson,
because she hasn’t had a McConaissance like her onetime costar yet, would be
the disgruntled housewife. Maybe Gerard Butler would be the widower receiving
her lunches and her letters. And eventually they would have some passionate
tryst before running away together, to the joy of female viewers everywhere.
Maybe Rihanna’s “We Found Love” would play during the credits or something, to
applaud them for escaping their “hopeless place.” And, scene!
But what keeps Batra’s film realistic, relatable, and even
somewhat tragic is how thoroughly it rejects that Hollywood (and even
Bollywood, if we’re being specific to India) formula, and doesn’t suggest that
happiness is right around the corner for either of its main characters. These
are people stuck in the ruts and rhythms of life, lonely islands in the
bustling city of Mumbai. An accident in the system brings them together, but
never actually physically; their trust and affection for each other grows
through letters, that outdated technology, and then is never truly consummated.
There’s longing and yearning in The Lunchbox, but how you view it will depend
on how you receive the conclusion: whether you think it’s a promise that will
eventually be fulfilled or one that will eventually be forgotten. It’s
thoughtful stuff.
The film begins with Ila (Nimrat Kaur), an unhappy housewife
who, after her husband leaves for work and her daughter leaves for school, is
found with nothing to do all day but have yelling conversations with her
upstairs neighbor, Auntie. Auntie, who spends her days caring for her catatonic
husband who spent years in a coma, shouts recipe instructions down to Ila, who
thinks her cooking can lure her husband to pay attention to her. She slaves
over paneer, she toasts roti bread, she packs it all up in a four-tier lunchbox
and then she sends it to her husband in the city through a dabbawala, or a
lunch-delivery service that is famous for its accuracy and punctuality. And
when the lunchbox comes back each day, she tries to gauge it, what he ate and
what he didn’t, to tweak what she makes the next day. It’s a never-ending
process to her husband’s heart through his stomach, but it doesn’t seem to be
getting anywhere.
Until one day, when the lunchbox comes back totally
empty—practically licked clean—and she realizes the lunch never went to her
husband at all, but mistakenly to about-to-retire government worker Saajan (Irrfan
Khan). A widower who is so introverted that he moves like a ghost, barely
interacting with colleagues and going through the motions of train-into-work,
work, train-home-from-work, Ila’s meal begins to break him out of his monotony.
The next day, he receives another lunch, this time with a note from her
explaining that the meal was from her husband, but he only sends back one
comment: the food was “too salty.” It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s
certainly more communicating than he was doing otherwise—and the same for her,
too.
So a friendship develops, through these notes, which
function practically like anonymous messages in a bottle: if you threw your
truth and your feelings and your honesty out into the universe, what would come
back? The film moves at a good pace to bring us into Ila’s and Saajan’s growing
relationship while also developing them us as individuals: we learn that Ila’s
father is dying of lung cancer while her mother (Lillete Dubey, of Monsoon Wedding) suffers with taking
care of him, and we learn that Saajan is a good teacher when he tries, as he’s
in charge of mentoring the man replacing his position, Shaikh (Nawazuddin
Siddiqui).
No matter how brief these scenes are, you get a solid sense
of what Batra wants to convey: how family, how loneliness, how cultural
expectations can batter down your self-will. It helps that Kaur and Khan can
both do so much in a glance, in a look. When Ila realizes that her husband
might be having an affair, her face as she smells his shirts, cycling through
each of them while comprehension dawns on her, it’s a fantastic, mostly quiet
scene where you see her heart breaking. The same goes for Khan as he plays
Saajan smoking on his balcony each night, staring into the apartment of a happy
family across the street—with their home-cooked food, with their children, with
everything he hasn’t had since his wife died. Khan has always been a
magnificently expressive, subtle actor, and he excels here, too.
Nevertheless, there are some issues; you get an Eat, Pray,
Love sense of how food is one of the most important things in life, but that
feels a little simplistic for a film that’s also dealing with death and
familial abandonment at the same time. The connections don’t always work. And some
of the lines are a bit too on-the-nose, like Ila and Saajan wondering, “What do
we live for?” and complaining about cell phones and technology ruining human
interaction. And then there’s the ending, which is a bit of an Inception twist,
but in a romantic setting. It’s not a bad thing, necessarily, but if you’re
looking for something totally declarative, The Lunchbox doesn’t deliver it.
Overall, though, this is a thoughtful little movie, one that
benefits from its main performances and a nicely slow building romance. “You
let me into your dreams, and I want to thank you for that,” Saajan says to Ila,
and if that doesn’t have you blubbering quietly, then you’re probably a
soulless monster.
Rating: 4 out of 5 Guttenbergs
