Ritesh
Batra’s The Lunchbox toys with
Hollywood conventions to the point of frustration. His debut feature, in which
unfulfilled housewife Ila (Nimrat Kaur) finds herself in a blossoming pen-pal
relationship with retiring company man Saajan (Irrfan Khan), continuously
reignites the opportunity for his protagonists to meet, only for something to
get in the way. The convention is typical – think the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan
vehicle You’ve Got Mail – but its
execution is markedly different: The
Lunchbox is either a pretty terrible romantic comedy, or an unexpectedly
wonderful slice-of-life.
Set
in Mumbai, Batra’s main contemplation is how to connect two voiceless people in
a city of millions. He cleverly identifies the city’s infamous lunchbox service
– its international reputation is milked for the film’s best laughs – and its
potential for error as a way to drive together his protagonists. Ila puts most
of her morning into her husband’s lunch of the day, but his lunchbox is mixed
up with one of a nearby restaurant delivering to the widowed Saajan. From
there, the two exchange letters that begin as excessively blunt, but gradually
evolve.
Rather
than drawing up an elaborate plot for a You’ve
Got Mail-type romance, Batra uses these letters to get into the heads, the
lives, and the fears of two people that are utterly unfulfilled. Ila’s husband
does not pay her a shred of attention, and her life is spent cooking for a man she
has never even met. Her future is staring at her in the face; both her aunt and
mother are caring for their ailing husbands, miserable men who treated them
without love or respect for their entire marriages.
Saajan,
meanwhile, is preparing to retire from the claims department of a government
agency. He goes home, smokes, reads, watches television – there’s nothing left
to look forward to. His replacement, an overeager younger man whose
friendliness only turns Saajan off further, juxtaposes the hopeful with the
hopeless.
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| Nimrat Kaur (Sony Pictures Classics) |
There
are moments when The Lunchbox is
startlingly profound. The attempted suicide of a neglected housewife and her
young daughter stings Ila to the core. Through a letter to Saajan, she attempts
to dive into that woman’s headspace and does so with unsettling ease and
sadness. She asks, at the end of this particular letter, “What do we live for?”
Saajan, in his response, does not address the question.
The
question lingers over the entire film. Both spend their days looking forward to
the moment when they scrimmage through the lunch tins, searching for the one
containing a new letter. These are two people who really have nobody, whose
thoughts and voices are silenced, who find great happiness in being able to
simply express who they are and where they are in the world.
Batra
brings great specificity to this film. He has a colorful eye, a style not
overbearing or particularly singular but effectively complimentary, and he
captures Mumbai beautifully. From the overcrowded trains to the bustling streets
to the lifeless indoor spaces, he’s either squeezing people into a frame or
surrounding his protagonists with empty space. In either setting, Batra conveys
penetrating loneliness.
Khan
has played a version of this character before; in HBO’s In Treatment, he was sensational as a widower forced to live out of
his home in India, and in New York with his son. In “The Lunchbox,” Khan’s
Saajan is in his environment. He is home, surrounded by his people and stuck
with his wife’s old videotapes. Yet he exudes a similar foreignness, a
melancholic expression of aging and inescapable loneliness. It’s beautiful,
subtle work.
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| Irrfan Khan, center (Sony Pictures Classics) |
Best
about Khan’s performance is how effectively it meshes with Batra’s vision. This
is very much a film about Mumbai culture – the way men treat women, the way
aging brings about isolation no matter how many people are in your orbit – and
is all the better for it. Through the prism of Mumbai lifestyles, it asks a
crucial question: is there a point to dreaming?
Where
The Lunchbox is not as effective,
perhaps, is in trying to stay conventional and light. Its themes are dark, its
characters unfortunately miserable, and yet the film refuses to really dig into
the bleakness that its ideas suggest. Batra leaves you with a thoughtful
exploration of aging and loneliness, but he doesn’t take that final step in
really finishing up on it.
The
will-they-or-won’t-they-meet tension certainly plays nicely into Saajan’s fear
of connecting with someone younger and of dreaming when he feels he has no
right to – but in the film’s final third, it takes up too much time. It ends
predictably ambiguously, leaving the audience with a shimmer of hope that these
two individuals will find what they are looking for, even as they live in
circumstances where that is probably, sadly, impossible.
Grade: B
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