The Smell of Everyday City Life

The Lunchbox, a film of everyday life of Mumbai, is uniquely brilliant in its economy of language without verbose, precise dialogues and is marked by the characteristic precision of the actors’ expressions. Its visuals communicate a lot through sound and, above all, smell of food, of infidelity, of senility, and so forth. It becomes a container of a variety of expressions: affection, anger, riposte and rapprochement. It is a film exploring issues like the pathological side of conjugal relationships in a patriarchal family with great subtlety and optimism.

The Lunchbox smells of food. It savours of Indian kitchen. It whiffs of the perspiring Indian housewife at work, her loneliness and drudgery in the Indian urban nuclear family. It stinks of staleness in the marital relation lacking compatibility. It noses life – drenched urban middle class everyday lives in Indian city of Mumbai. Lives, however, not hermetically sealed but open with possibilities and hope.