It’s a scene that has always felt a tad too recognisable, in how it outlines the classic demand of the city: Living in Mumbai is paying attention to it. Take for instance, the worldless scene when Ila discovers that her husband, always too distracted to acknowledge her presence, might be having an affair. It’s a film that is an observational delight, elevated by Batra’s gaze, that weighs everyday objects and emotions with an oddly sentimental meaning. How we envelop care in the confines of a lunchbox, our longing within the folds of a letter, and our concern through recipes yelled out from windows.
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The Lunchbox is a film that thrives on the various little ways – seen and unseen – we forge connections in a city that works overtime to alienate us how we actively bridge the burden of distance at a time when the default reaction of the world is to be distant. Yet, Batra centres their companionship on a tender bond that harps on their co-existence. Ideally, Aslam and Sajjan would have been nemesis’s both of them represent a contrasting outlook of not just the world, but also Mumbai. Or how it focuses on how Aslam (a scene-stealing Nawazuddin Siddiqui ), the cheery younger replacement for Sajjan who has toiled away at his desk managing accounts for 30 years, disguises the fear that accompanies upward social mobility by being almost too pushy and overeager. For instance, it’s the closeup scenes of packed trains that goad the realisation that the “dabbawalas” (an army of food delivery men local to the city) are often branded as the lifeline of the city, ferrying food from plate to stomach, when their lives remain perennially on the line. The Lunchbox recreates the dichotomies of life instead of merely resembling them.īatra’s camera and his judicious use of offscreen space smartly litters these touches throughout the runtime of The Lunchbox. You have to have lost everything to not be worried about losing anything. It is a reminder that more often than not, crushing loneliness is the window to unabashed longing. The Lunchbox then, thrives more on recreating the dichotomies of life instead of merely resembling them. It’s as if Batra invites two distinct parts of life experiences – habituated to fight against one another – to confront each other in the living room, in a way making them whole, eventually revealing how dependent they are on each other. Notice how the distance between Ila and her husband despite their physical proximity is juxtaposed with the emotional intimacy between Ila and Sajjan, inspite of them being gloriously unaware of the intricacies of each other’s existence. Instead, The Lunchbox gently places these next to each other. What stands out however is how Batra strays away from following convention, evident in his reluctance to make the film’s narrative all about the tussle between the city’s inherent contradictions. It’s fitting that The Lunchbox is set in Mumbai, given that its themes are centred on a host of contradictions: modernisation and stagnation, youth and old age, promotion and retirement, and a union of marriage and enforced solitude. These lives are Ila (Nimrat Kaur), a young neglected wife, and Sajjan Fernandes ( Irrfan Khan ), a middle-aged widower. At its heart is a tale that is as old as time: two disparate lives whose trajectories collide despite the social barriers the world has put in place to distance them. Released six years ago, Batra’s debut film, an epistolary romance, is a strikingly unadorned affair. There is no Hindi movie in recent times that has made this distinction with as much of an aching clarity as Ritesh Batra ’s The Lunchbox. The city is a disease and its inhabitants, the diseased.
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It’s the kind of cyclical hunger that tends to deplete but also in its own way, drives a swarm of faceless men and women to survive day after day, at the cost of perishing. Every second person in this brimming, alienating, gruelling city is invariably searching for sustenance – dietary, physical, but also emotional.