Visual storytelling in The Lunchbox

When making simple distinctions between types of cinema, we often think of “character-driven” stories (vis-à-vis “action-driven” stories) as being filled with conversation or monologues. Just last week, I wrote about a relationship film – Shuddh Desi Romance – that was all about talking and analysing; explaining things to others, to yourself, to the viewer. But one of the surprises – and eventually, for me, one of the great pleasures – of Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox was that some of its most effective moments relied on visual storytelling (or as the cliché has it, “pure cinema”), requiring special engagement on the viewer’s part over and above what is being said by the characters. In some scenes I felt almost like I was watching the sort of quietly elegant human comedy that Tati or Keaton did so well.

A marker of that visual engagement is an object, introduced at the start of the film: a tiffin lunch nestled in a green-and-white cover, which makes its way – via Mumbai’s famous dabba-wallahs – from a home to an office. As the dabba-wallahs take countless lunch-boxes through rush-hour traffic, our attention remains fixed on the distinct green-and-white bag, the sunlight dappling on it through the train’s windows. Then, less than 10 minutes into the film, come two wordless scenes that tell us the “plot” is underway. A middle-aged man named Fernandes (Irrfan Khan) unzips the green-white cover and starts to open the tiffin, but we see that something is off. What began as an almost unconscious action – something he mechanically does at exactly this time each day – becomes more deliberate; we can tell that the container he is opening is not the sort of container he is accustomed to handling. (This is a man whose life has been built around routine – he has been in the same job, in an insurance firm’s claims department, for 35 years – but now, confronted with newness, his eyes click into focus.) In the next scene, the container has been returned to the doorstep of a woman named Ila (Nimrat Kaur), and her movements as she picks up the bag are just as mechanical as Fernandes’s were, but then she hesitates, weighs the tiffin in her hand, realises that it is empty – clearly not an everyday occurrence. A look of cautious pleasure crosses her face.

Not a word has been spoken in these two scenes, even the gestures aren’t especially pronounced, yet the attentive viewer can easily figure out what has happened. There has been a mistake in the delivery of a lunch box; Mr Fernandes has eaten the food meant for Ila’s husband; Ila, who is used to leftovers being sent back and noncommittal grunts of acknowledgement later in the evening, is happy that her cooking has been appreciated. These sequences are so fluid, so well constructed and performed, that we have no trouble accepting the basic premise (even given the widely circulated statistics about the efficiency of the dabba-wallahs) or what follows: Ila discovers the mix-up but sends Fernandes lunch again, along with a letter (“Thank you bannta hai na,” she tells her confidante, an old neighbour) – and then, in the email age, these two people who know nothing about each other begin an unlikely correspondence by dabba.

Understatement in cinema can be a tricky thing. Get it wrong and you’re in danger of not just making the film flat and uninvolving, but also appearing just as self-conscious and forced as the “over-doer”. (As Orson Welles once put it, “Ham actors are not all of them strutters and fretters, theatrical vocalizers – a lot of them are understaters, flashing winsome little smiles over the teacups, or scratching their T-shirts.”) The Lunchbox gets understatement and restraint exactly right, both in the outstanding lead performances by Khan and Kaur as the lonely-hearts and in Batra’s delicate screenplay, which makes expert use of the “show, don’t tell” principle. The viewer is constantly invited to participate in this story, to work things out as layers are slowly peeled away. When Fernandes goes to the little restaurant that sends him his lunch – to tell them he is retiring next month, he won’t need the dabbas any more – we can make out a blurred mass of familiar green-and-white container-bags in the window (they are visible but not obtrusive) and it helps us understand how the mix-up might have happened. Later, hearing about a woman who jumped off a building with her daughter, he fears it might be Ila, and we feel his tension in the subsequent scene where he is seated at his office desk around lunch hour and the dabba-wallah does the rounds in the background, apparently bypassing Fernandes’s desk and moving away (while Fernandes cranes his neck anxiously) before returning and setting down the comforting green-white package. Purposeful silences and long pauses in films can be gimmicky (and sometimes, a film that is celebrated for “requiring the viewer to be patient” is really a film that requires a viewer to be bored), but here the writing and the acting reveals character, facilitates full engagement and lets the viewer use the silences to figure out what is happening, what someone is thinking, what may be coming next.

There are so many other subtle touches, from a glimpse of a bathroom mirror that has rarely needed to be wiped clean, to the gamut of expressions on Ila’s face when she doesn’t see a letter in the tiffin but then finds it under a roti, or a scene where a phone is answered off-screen and we need to hear only a couple of words, spoken in a hurried, matter-of-fact tone, to gather that the speaker’s father has died and that she barely has time to sob a little to herself while preparing to leave for the crematorium. I also liked the way in which Fernandes’s first name is revealed to us more than halfway through the film, and how the construction of that sequence ties in with another theme – nostalgia for a distant past, felt by people who have aged without realising it. (This IS made explicit in the screenplay at one point, when Fernandes talks about why he suddenly felt the need to watch episodes of his deceased wife’s favourite old TV show, Yeh jo Hai Zindagi. But when Ila asks to play the songs of a romantic film from 20 years ago, one might guess that it is not just an expression of her current feelings but also a brief return to a childhood when her life was simpler and happier.)

This is a story about people connected in tenuous ways: by a dabba-wallah’s mistake, by shouted conversation across the walls of an old building, by a basket lowered outside the window of a flat to the one below. (Though one of the key characters, Ila’s old “aunty”, is never seen – she is just a disembodied voice – we feel we know her well.) There are visual links between the two protagonists too: one person’s voiceover seems to comment on the other’s actions, and there are echoing gestures, including mundane ones like waving flies away from food; reminders that many of the quotidian details of Ila's and Fernandes's lives are similar. They feel similarly isolated and “rocked back and forth by life” (as Fernandes puts it in a letter, while the visuals shows him sitting in a juddering local train), and they unrealistically dream of moving together to a land where gross national happiness is the stock in trade. But there is of course the possibility that they will remain ultimately cut off, like ships passing in the night, or like the two trains in the film's opening shot, moving towards each other slowly on parallel tracks, so near and yet so distant. And given these various possibilities, as well as the delicacy of the film’s structure, I thought the open-endedness of its conclusion was just right. As so much else is.