In The Lunchbox, a movie that is creating waves (and not a bit of controversy, given it was overlooked for India's official entry for the Oscars), Ila, the housewife, has a moment of truth when she hears her mother babble over the dead body of Ila's father. "I loved him when you were young but for the last few years I could not stand him," she says, using the Hindi phrase "unse ghin aati thi" for effect.
Up until then, Ila had seemed to reconcile herself to her fate. Saajan, her presumptive boyfriend, who is several years older than her, had denied her a meeting because he wanted her to "live your life ahead of you". Until the end, we do not find out whether Ila and Saajan do indeed get together. We only know that Ila has made up her mind to shift to Bhutan (an innocently wacky thread that nevertheless assumes heft) and that Saajan has decided to pursue her.
In Ila, debutant director Ritesh Batra meticulously adduces all the markers of the ignored housewife. The distant husband who, at first, does not give her the time of day, and, later, is shown to have an affair. The daily chores, including the washing of his clothes, which gives her the first indication of spousal impropriety. The deadening regularity. The only bright spark in this melange is her daughter and an aunt whom we never see but who is the only character Mr Batra portrays in a light vein.
Mr Batra builds upon the quiet desperation of the suburban life to bring forth a story of such shocking intimacy that it is difficult to imagine that it is fictive. When Ila writes to Saajan about the double suicide of a young mother and her daughter that she heard about on the news, the director shows her repeating the motions. "Oonchai se darr bhi to lagta hai," she concludes in her letter to Saajan, as she is shown looking down from a building, her blindfolded daughter to hand. We do not learn if this is merely a directorial tic or if Ila indeed tried to kill herself, unsuccessfully. One suspects the latter.
In last year's film English Vinglish, another overlooked housewife earns the respect of her family by learning English and speaking in it at the wedding of her niece. The story ends on a suitably acceptable note; the housewife returns to India with her family, having proved her point and effected a change in their behaviour towards her. Had she gone ahead and lived the rest of her days with the admiring Frenchman, the movie's commercial success would be in the realm of speculation.
Pleasingly, no such qualms bother The Lunchbox. Apart from her initial brief efforts to win her husband's love, there is no attempt on Ila's part to confront or appease him. The knowledge of his infidelity is merely a footnote to, not the body of, her exasperation with life. If anything, the husband here is a more comic than threatening figure, generally absent, his actions only backgrounding Ila's fierce search for happiness.
The Lunchbox, among its many merits, is a beautifully executed paean to loneliness. That Mr Batra worked with a consummate actor, Irrfan Khan, may have contributed to this, but there is no denying that the storyline itself, with its tangents and tributes, is a work of considerable skill. Mumbai, with its sudden rains and crowded local trains, is itself a character in the movie. Suicide and disease punctuate the narrative.
Shubhra Gupta, writing in The Indian Express, faulted the director for not capturing the essentially Catholic ethos of Bandra, where Saajan stays. I did not locate any discrepancy. Yes, Saajan is Catholic, but it is his loneliness that is his true religion. Witness him playing old cassettes of Doordarshan shows that were a favourite of his wife's, or puffing on a cigarette in the balcony. Witness, too, his relief when the girl next door forgoes pulling the sliding window of the dining room as he peers into her house.
The Lunchbox, along with this year's other masterpiece, Ship of Theseus, heralds a new directorial vision in Hindi films. There is little apologia here, either in Ila's understated courage in the former or the monk's ultimate decision to choose life in the latter. In making the choices their characters make and in delineating the processes by which they arrive at those choices, these directors show a willingness to embrace the uncertain, the grey, the ambiguous, with a relish rarely seen in our movies. May their tribe increase!
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