AS regular and as ordinary as the lunchbox, the Indian film titled after this nondescript container of one’s midday meal proves that the magic of this thing called life is in the day-to-day, in the observable pattern that recurs each day, over and over again.
Ila is the housewife. She is not a bored housewife; in fact, given her effort at the kitchen each day, she must have an interesting day always. The day, however, is interesting because Ila makes it interesting. Perhaps, it is the situation she finds herself in that makes for an interesting, if not disturbing, life.
The Lunchbox opens with Ila making use of ingredients proffered to her by an aunt who lives one floor above. This morning, the aunt with a voice that seems to know life at its fullest is telling Ila not to put too much of that ingredient in what she is cooking. Composed properly, the food, according to the aunt who is almost the Almighty because she is able to tell whether her niece believes in her or is smiling with skepticism, should convince Ila’s husband about her virtues as a wife. The potency of the food can be so great that the aunt is convinced the man for whom the food is intended may build a Taj Mahal for Ila.
To this, Ila responds with a reminder to her aunt that Taj Mahal, a symbol of great love, is actually a tomb.
The banter makes us smile. Here in this household, women are out to please their men. In the case of the aunt upstairs, that pleasing includes caring for a husband who has been comatose for some time now. In this society, women generally stay at home, and when their husbands turn cold, the sense is that they—as wives and lovers—are not generous enough with their love and nurturing.
That day, the lunchbox journeys. Men and train conspire to bring the food to the one who deserves it. But the lunchbox for some reason is lost and finds its way to the table of a lonely man, Saajan Fernandes. He works all alone and does not seem interested in talking with the man beside him—or anyone at all. That day, an assistant is introduced to him but he ignores the new employee. Fernandes is supposed to train this young man but his mind is somewhere else. Preoccupied, the government employee is seen contemplating the food and then eats them, aware he is of the different aroma.
The lunchbox is delivered back to Ila’s home and the housewife notices how clean the wares are. “Licked clean,” she observes. She calls out her aunt and reports the event for that day.
That evening Ila’s husband comes home and never talks about the food. It quickly becomes clear to Ila that the food has been delivered to the wrong person. The aunt has a different perspective: the man, whoever he is, should at least thank Ila. Soon, a letter is placed in one of the wares in the lunchbox, and soon a response is received. Ila and the man have an exchange. The man notices every bit of nuanced taste in the food Ila sends.
The regularity of the letter echoes the clockwork predictability of the man with his bicycle parking below the window of Ila’s home, the travel that lunchboxes undertake, and the lunchbox men. With these lunchboxes, the city opens its heart to us—this wide expanse where it is impossible to make connections. And when the link is forged between a young wife and a bored man, then we know that there are cities where chance, serendipity or even reincarnation can and do take place.
The Lunchbox, the film, delivers to us warm, even hot dishes about life’s pains and deaths, or a dying man’s contribution to a well-lived life.
The city promises no happy ending but it also does not stop its people from thinking that there is more to life than sitting behind the table the whole day, sending the right amount of money to people you don’t even know. That, in that job, when one commits an error in computing, the world begins to know and wishes to know who committed the mistake.
The greatest surprise in this film about the ordinary lives of people is that the constant and the recurring can be a magical site for persons. The magic need not be of the charming variety. That life is volatile and sometimes too certain can be the source of the dark sorcery about the same. When Ila’s father dies, she visits her mother who is bereft of grief.
Instead of lament, the mother makes it known how tired she has been for so long. That when death finally came to claim the man she has spent all her good years, all that she feels is remorse and anger. And hunger. Ila’s mother is simply hungry as the camera wanders onto the corpse being readied out of the house.
The Lunchbox is directed by Ritesh Batra and opened the film festival Cinema One Originals 2014 on November 8 at TriNoma in Quezon City. The use of an Asian and non-Filipino film, according to Cinema One’s Ronald Arguelles, is an attempt to include an Asian horizon in the film concourse. That the opening film is an Indian film without the endless dancing we append to memories of Bollywood extravaganza is significant.
The film also introduces to the Filipino audience two compelling and charismatic actors. There is the character of Saajan Fernandes, played by Irrfan Khan. Unobtrusive, any slight change Khan makes, like a careful shaving of a goatee, becomes a light on his character—one who always feels old because he senses the presence of his grandfather in the room. Then there is the lovely Nimrat Kaur, as Ila. Wondrously lost in being a housewife, she cooks and puts in her dishes her destiny. When at last she confronts the dark horizon of her quiet married life, we fear for her life and for the character that is most hopeful in this film.
Elwood Perez’s Manila: Esoterika is the other film that opened Cinema One Originals 2014. Flamboyant, fantastic and fierce, the film seems to be guided by an Orpheus claiming his Manila from hell. But, like the mythical Orpheus, the film’s conscience or mind looks back and looks back again.
The result is a landscape littered with the decay of our city. In the hands of Elwood Perez and in a screenplay co-written with Jessica Zafra, this depiction of a city and its people threatens to be a cult film even as it has seduced the young audience already that night. If this is another of Elwood’s reintroduction (he made a film called Otso for Sineng Pambansa last year), then the director was just right with his excitement that night in TriNoma. Elwood must be the last of our elegantly and disturbingly trenchant filmmakers. As always, his film seethes with the offer: Take me or leave me, baby.