Directed by Ritesh Batra with Nimrat Kaur and Irrfan Khan

Apparently Mumbai has what seems to me like an incredibly complex system to deliver lunchboxes from home to workers by dabbawalas – something I knew nothing about before seeing this film and am still marvelling at.

The starting point is an uncharacteristic error in delivery, so that a lunchbox cooked by an unhappy young wife for her husband is delivered by accident to a morose widower on the brink of retirement from an accounts department. They begin a correspondence by notes in the lunchbox trays, opening their hearts to each other and re-evaluating their own lives as they do so. She realises that her husband is having an affair and that their marriage is beyond her attempts to revive it; he realises how withdrawn he has become. Perhaps there could be a romance between them (some reviewers took it to be one), but that is only one strand of the film. It’s about more than that. Mumbai is so crowded that first-class commuter travel means standing armpit to armpit, but even here loneliness and oppression creeps in. All scenes seemed hemmed in – in her flat, his office, local transport – with no broader vistas. Family offered a different form of loneliness – her mother’s and her neighbour’s diligence in caring for their sick, unresponsive husbands, her own husband’s indifference. His replacement – perhaps supposed to be there for light relief, but I don’t know enough to tell – was a chirpy younger man without family (a social black mark against him) who would do anything to advance in life: willing to work anywhere, ready to lie, but withal endearing.

It was unsparing about age and illness: his horror of discovering that his bathroom smelled like his grandfather’s, her mother’s outburst of despair at the awfulness of nursing her husband. Really, it’s a melancholy tale, with the camerawork suggesting characters are trapped or only half-seen – but there is something about the possibility of choosing another life that transcends the bleakness. I was quite transfixed by it.