Ritesh Batra's tasty epistolary film.
Metropolises, you know, are always so chaotic and stressful that they leave no room for feelings. And you end up, in a big metropolis like Mumbai in Indiaamidst the noise of a city that is always in a hurry and never sleeps, to lose that very thin thread of humanity that binds people together and to be overwhelmed and moulded by a dangerous cynicism.
This is what happens in Lunchboxthe 'low budget' film by Ritesh Batra of 2013produced by leading actor Irrfan Khan, with a script completed at the TorinoFilmLab and winner of the Critics Week Viewers Choice Award at the Festival of Cannes of that year.
We are at Mumbai or Bombay which, together with the two metropolitan areas of Ships Mumbai e Thanewith a total of 21 million inhabitants, represents the most populous area in the
planet. The inhabitants of this megalopolis are crammed into offices and neighbourhoods designed by skyscrapers, symbols of uncontrolled development that is too fast to stop and think about relationships.
Every morning, an efficient network of messengers delivers lunchboxes prepared by workers' wives to the workplace.
These include the housewife Ila Singh, a resident of a middle-class Hindu neighbourhood, who labours every day to prepare succulent and complex lunches in an attempt to
to recover her failing marriage, with a husband who does not even notice her.
As chance would have it, due to a wrong delivery, the woman soon comes into contact with Saajan Thomasa lonely man who lives in an old Christian neighbourhood, greying
since the death of his wife.
A unique and romantic correspondence begins between the two, preserved in the typical dabbawala or dabbawalla, containers usually made of steel for take-away food, consisting of several bowls placed on top of each other and held together by a metal hook.
Mistakes become fatal and food, stored in a lunchbox, becomes the lightest and most pleasant vehicle for nourishing good feelings.
The correspondence between the two protagonists continues, until Saajan to search within himself for a new life force and to open up to love, and to Ila, that perhaps it is time for her to change something too.
Far from being a sugary, cheesy comedy, the film is a way of reflecting on human relationships and how economic development, which obeys other laws, often belittles and abrutes people. Ritesh Batra's fragrant and delicate narrative is a reminder of the density of a society counterbalanced by an emptiness of soul, soon redeemed by this simple story that makes love for the other, to which the profound meaning of self is inevitably linked, sprout and revive.
The lunches prepared by Ila, which at first are rich in aromas and spices and complicated in execution, as her feeling grows, are transformed into simple and equally tasty dishes, demonstrating how we often have the urge to return to the essence of things and how life finds its reason in simple things, in authentic feelings.
A film based on communication, which takes place through the words of small 'messages in the bottle'but especially through the flavours and aromas of recipes that conceal dedication and attention to the other, all in a powerful and reasoned visual dimension that screams our need for romance.
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