The Lunchbox

**Spoiler Alert**

Dir. Ritesh Batra. Starring: Irrfan Khan and Nimrat Kaur

I thought I had The Lunchbox pegged when I first watched the preview. It looked like a feel-good, light, Indian bauble but little more. I was surprised and pleased to find it defied my preconceptions.

Ritesh Batra's first feature-length film tells a story that relies heavily on three key performances and a deceptively simple story that weaves something both resonant and poetic.

As the film begins, we see the intricate process by which lunches are delivered to office workers in Mumbai. Bicycle, car, train--any and all manner of conveyance is employed to deliver the lunches, which are secured in small, distinctive, cloth bags.

With advice and sometimes ingredients provided from her aunt who lives above, Ila (Nimrat Kaur), spends her mornings preparing sumptuous lunches for her husband with such love and care, in hopes of rekindling her moribund marriage. Each day she is greeted at her door by the courier, who begins the arduous journey to the office.
Ila discovers one day that the lunches she has been preparing have been delivered to the wrong recipient.

Irrfan Khan-familiar to movie fans as the narrator of Life of Pi, plays a government number-cruncher named Saajan Fernandes, whose thirty-five years of service are about to end. He has also been assigned the task of training an irrepressibly friendly man named Shaikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), who he almost ignores on principle, in spite of the man's tenacious attempts to ingratiate himself to Saajan. A widower who lives alone, Saajan arrives home everyday to shoo away neighborhood kids who enjoy playing near his front gate.

Saajan receives Ila's lunches, finding the food's intoxicating aromas irresistable. Rather than return the lunches or correct the courier, he begins to enjoy them everyday; separating the silvery, metallic containers in which the food is stored from one another in what becomes a mid-day ritual. Ila soon learns her lunches are being consumed by someone other than her husband and begins leaving notes for the mysterious recipient in one of the containers. Saajan returns the notes, commenting on the food and eventually dispensing advice to Ila on her marital woes.

I thought I knew the direction the story would take: Saajan would strike up a friendship, then dabble in a flirtation and near romance before guiding Ila to a happy reconciliation with her husband. Only Saajan and Ila's epistolary friendship is evident from the previews, the rest of the film unfolds unpredictably.

Saajan's sad longing for his wife and his lonely evenings at home are paralleled by Ila's desperate attempts to reclaim her husband's affection, which fail miserably. As the deliveries continue, Saajan is soon sharing his food with Shaikh; who invites himself to the lunchtime table. Shaikh also falls under the spell of Ila's cooking and as a friendship develops between the two men, Shaikh invites Saajan to his home to sample some of what he believes to be his own exceptional cooking.

It is easy to see that food plays an integral role in the story. It serves as something to mend, to unite, to seduce and to express what words and physical gestures cannot. Food has taken on a symbolic role in films before. Babette's Feast is a notable example, but in Batra's film it takes on a more personal, urgent dimension. A scene where Ila and Saajan are to meet in a restaurant shows her waiting pensively for him to arrive. She drinks only water--eats nothing-and is stood up. We learn later that Saajan was actually in the restaurant but didn't make contact with her. It's interesting that the absence of food in a restaurant creates a wider gulf between them than the actual, vaster distance between Ila's kitchen and the lunchroom where Saajan enjoys her dishes.

The Lunchbox demonstrates Batra's directorial potential; his ability to coax exceptional performances from the cast and to tell a poignant story set in a few interiors with precision and economy. First feature films aren't normally so accomplished. It will be fun to see what he comes up with next.