Watched on Amazon Prime

The sensuality of food prepared with love awakens two people from the rigidity of their entrenched everyday lives. Through an unusual mode of communication, a fragile bond of friendship and affection emerges, exposed to the harshness and unpredictability of reality. An endearing film by director, co-screenwriter and producer Ritesh Batra about the small gestures of life and the special way of listening.

When chance brings them together, unbeknownst to them, both housewife and young mother Ila and the near-retired Saajan, both at home in the metropolis of Mumbai, are tired of their lives. Ila is in the process of winning back her estranged husband with the help of special cooking skills. But even if the inscrutable delivery system of the "dabbawalas", a horde of employees who deliver the housewives' freshly prepared food to their husbands' offices every day by bicycle, train and on foot, is supposedly perfect, they are also fallible. So Ila's food gets to the wrong - or even more correct - recipient.

Saajan, skilfully portrayed with small very funny and melancholic gestures by Irrfan Khan, is a still attractive but frightened by his own age office worker for damages. His widowhood and 35 years of service have led to a mechanical rhythm of days from which Ila's food brings him back to life. Both Ila and Saajan are well served by a resulting correspondence portrayed with visual ingenuity. The scriptwriter's delicate hand hides small gestures of simultaneity - the intercut split-second waving away of an annoying fly by both characters, the cinematically juxtaposed gazes of both characters at the same object - creating a poetry to which one willingly surrenders as a viewer.

Refreshingly new to the film is a character who consists of only a voice and a basket - the supporting character of "Auntie", a neighbour of Ila's whose existence adds to the mystery of the film.

Not only is the viewer's appetite whetted when Ila is shown preparing spicy food, almost as if in passing, the chaos of the colourful and merciless metropolis, which functions according to invisible rules, is revealed. The hustle and bustle on the streets, the pushing in the lanes, how one has to cope with the physical crowding on a daily basis, the poverty of the street children, the tragedy of individual fates, and how they can be overcome with a little luck and humanity - all this finds a place in the verbally sparse film. The search for happiness and the hurdles that stand in its way, death, ageing and rebellion against it create an alternation between wit and sadness that wins the viewer over.

The Indian-French-German co-production obviously did the film good, because every viewer in the world can take something for themselves from this simple typical Indian story.