The Lunchbox (2014)

Directed by Ritesh Batra.

Each working day the dabbawallas of Mumbai deliver home-cooked meals to office workers throughout the city via a collection and distribution network famous for its efficiency and accuracy.  Ritesh Batra’s first feature posits a glitch in the system whereby the lunches for two men are switched and each continues to receive the other man’s lunch.

 

Saajan (Iirfan Khan) is surprised to find that the dull food sent by a commercial lunch firm has suddenly increased dramatically in quality.  When she receives the empty lunchbox the cook, Ila (Nimrat Kaur), thinks that her usually indifferent husband has been pleased by the food, but he makes no comment.  She works out that someone else is appreciating her cooking, and sends a note with the next meal.

The scarcely imaginable failure of the dabbawalla system has created a link between two strangers who are only able to communicate via notes in the lunchbox; the notes are at first tentative, a little stiff, but the care in the cooking and the fact that the food is so appreciated conveys its own message.  Sajaan writes back via the returned lunchbox.  Ila’s husband does not notice the change in his meals – he pays no attention to anything she does or says.  Ila wants another child, but her husband has no interest.  Slowly she and Sajaan begin to reveal more to each other.

Sajaan is a senior clerk in an insurance office, a widower with no children.  He appears to have no friends, and behind his blank reserve we see a lonely, intelligent man, planning to take retirement but with no apparent plans beyond that.  In anticipation of Sajaan’s retirement, his boss asks him to train his replacement, a new employee named Shaikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui).

Sajaan takes a dislike to Shaikh, unsurprisingly, but he says nothing directly.  In his scenes with Shaikh, and alone with the lunchbox, Iirfan Khan conveys Sajaan’s thoughts with a gesture, a glance or a sniff at the lunch box.  We recognise his isolation and despair, his determined foreswearing of hope and desire, but also the tiny shifts by which he begins to re-engage with the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ila is much younger than Sajaan and not quite so isolated.  She loves her daughter and has shouted conversations with Auntie, the woman in the apartment above who cares for her bedridden husband; she also visits her mother regularly.  These relationships are all a support to her, but it seems as if her husband can barely stand to be in the same room.

Sajaan takes a dislike to Shaikh whom he finds intrusive and unreliable.  Khan conveys this by glances, and staring stonily at Shaikh as he chats to another worker when he had made an appointment to speak to Sajaan.  The ice is broken when Shaikh sit with him at the lunch table and comments on the delicious lunch.

Sajaan slowly becomes more responsive  and less introspectively gloomy, taking an interest in the struggles of both Shaikh and Ila.  He and Ila follow opposed trajectories through the film, his rise from despair counterpoints her slide into misery as she realises her husband is having an affair and truly doesn’t care about her and his child.

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The epistolary novel exists only in its text, of course, but epistolary cinema forces decisions the novelist need not make.  The great exemplar is 84 Charing Cross Rd (1987) in which an American woman orders books from a British bookseller and they conduct a correspondence aver many years without ever meeting.  The characters speak their piece direct to camera, interspersed with reaction shots, giving life to what might otherwise be a very tedious exercise in voice-over.

In films, the epistolary mode gives structure, but the action is mostly in the day-to-day lives of the separated pair.  The paragon of this type is Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940) in which the protagonists correspond after one answers an ad in a newspaper.  Idealised romantic feelings develop between the correspondents who are not aware that they work in the same shop, and furthermore they detest each other.  The frustrated longing expressed in the letters contrasts deliciously with the squabbling and sniping in the shop, and meanwhile the intrigues, rivalries and double-crossing of the other staff swirl all about them.

Nora Ephron was fond of this device of two characters made for each other who can’t manage to get together until the end of the film.  When Harry Met Sally, then a remake of Lubitsch, You’ve Got Mail, and finally Sleepless in Seattle.  Meg Ryan starred in all three, with Tom Hanks in the last two.  Casting by an insurance company, no risk of failure and no chance of greatness.

But Sajaan and Ila aren’t made for each other.  Since the death of his wife he has entirely closed down, but Ila has wakened him.  He sees Shaikh and his fiancée in love despite their difference in social class, and acts as Shaikh’s best man at his wedding.  He and Ila flirt with the idea of going to Bhutan together , and they agree to meet in a café – shades of Lubitsch – but although Ila waits he doesn’t appear.  In fact he had been there, but seeing a beautiful, much younger woman he suddenly decides that it would be wrong for a man of his age to take up with her.

Feeling abandoned, Ila contemplates suicide.  Sajaan leaves his job and Mumbai, and having again tried to reach him and failing, Ila leaves for Bhutan.  Sajaan returns to Mumbai, hoping the dabbawallas will help him to find her.  Batra ends his story at that point – no resolution, but only the travelling in hope.