When food takes centre stage, as a simile, a metaphor or a leitmotif in films it sends out more signals than just hunger pangs

AMONG ONE’S LASTING MEMORIES of the new American fi lm Chef are close-ups of succulent Cuban sandwiches being grilled just so—until they reach the exact golden shade required—and handed over to eager customers. For the fi lm’s protagonist Carl, earning a livelihood by making these sandwiches in a mobile van can be viewed as a comedown: after all, Carl used to be a restaurant chef supervising the creation of haute cuisine. “Cubanos”, on the other hand, are the most plebian, workmanlike meal you can prepare— basically just cheese and ham packed in bread. Anyone can throw them together, right?

But this story is about getting back to basics and learning that even the simplest things can be done masterfully if you put your heart and soul into them. Carl’s journey to this realisation begins when one of his prestigious restaurant dinners is trashed by an eminent critic—the incident leads him to quit his job and to hire that broken-down van instead. His new venture becomes a voyage of self-discovery, as well as a chance to bond with the son whom he never spent much time with earlier because he was too busy chasing his highbrow culinary aspirations.

In other words, though Chef is a “food film”—with many scenes that will have your stomach sending urgent messages to your brain—food is a pretext for examining larger ideas about people and their relationships. And this has also been the case for a few recent Indian fi lms that centre, in some way or the other, on eating. The best known of them is probably the acclaimed The Lunchbox, the opening sequence of which introduces a tiffi n lunch nestled in a greenandwhite cover, which makes its way—via Mumbai’s famous dabbawallah— from a home to an offi ce. Then come two wordless scenes that set the plot in motion. A middle-aged man named Fernandes (Irrfan Khan) unzips the green-white cover and starts to open the tiffi n, but we see that something is off. What began as an almost unconscious action becomes more deliberate; we can tell that this is not the sort of container he is accustomed to handling each day. 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, but then she hesitates, weighs the tiffi n in her hand, realises that it is empty—clearly not an everyday occurrence. A look of cautious pleasure crosses her face.

Together, these two scenes—almost completely bereft of dialogue—tell us that there has been a mistake in the delivery of a lunchbox; that Fernandes has eaten the food meant for Ila’s husband; and that Ila, who is used to leftovers being sent back and noncommittal grunts of acknowledgement later in the evening, is happy her cooking has been appreciated for once. The enthusiastically consumed roti-sabzi paves the way for a most unusual relationship between these two lonely hearts, who communicate with each other by sending letters back and forth in the dabba. A lunchbox is also central to Amole Gupte’s Stanley ka Dabba, in which Mr Verma, a school-teacher with a wolfish appetite, bullies children into sharing their tiffins with him. But little Stanley, who doesn’t have his own lunchbox, soon begins to wilt in the face of adult hegemony. All this leads up to a revelation that makes this film a little pedantic in tone (it turns out the boy is from a lower-class family and has to work nights at a restaurant), but more intriguing is what we don’t learn about Verma. Some of the scenes involving this gruff, portly man invite us to wonder about his own background, and where his great hunger springs from. It is possible even to speculate that he and Stanley might have more in common than either of them realise.

They both probably love rich Punjabi food too, in which case they would be well advised not to see Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana on an empty stomach. In this film, as in Chef, food is a plot device that facilitates a character’s coming of age. In a version of the prodigal son story, the self-centred, Londonbased Omi (Kunal Kapoor) returns to his family village mainly because he needs financial aid. But soon he learns to take on responsibility, and what gets him started is the need to trace an old family recipe for the Chicken Khurana dish, which was the piece de resistance of his grandfather’s dhaba. Home food becomes a metaphor for deepening relationships and the “lost” recipe seems to represent the loosening of ties in a world where youngsters are eager to leave family. At one point Omi asks a number of people about their Chicken Khurana memories, and the variety of responses include one by a married couple whose “proposal” happened over the dish, and someone else who remarks that daarji used to put his own mitthaas (sweetness) into his cooking. Mitthaas is not the principal ingredient of the gol-gappas prepared by Rani (Kangana Ranaut) in Queen. A wide-eyed but spunky girl who travels abroad on a single-person “honeymoon” after her fiancé calls off their wedding, Rani passes a big test when her Indian dish is a hit at an Amsterdam street-food festival. The gol-gappas don’t go down well at first: Dutch people with their sensitive stomachs choke, look like they are about to have a heart attack, and go away muttering angrily to themselves. But in a few minutes they return, because they are intrigued. Then, they are addicted. The food here is almost like a metaphor for what the India experience can be for non-Indians: initial alarm and doubt followed by a gradually developed affection. (The country, as the cliché has it, is an acquired taste.)

Food has played a symbolic role in many older fi lms too. In a lovely climacticscene in Satyajit Ray’s fantasy classic Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, pots filled with mithaai rain down from the sky, and hungry soldiers abandon their weapons and run towards them; this is very much part of the fi lm’s larger pacifi st theme. Kundan Shah’s Jaane bhi do Yaaro has the famous “Thoda khao, thoda phenko” scene where people throw pieces of cake about—this is slapstick comedy, derived from the pie-in-the-face tradition of silent films, but the fi lm is a hard-hitting social satire and the scene is also a comment on wastage in consumerist societies. And in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Bawarchi, Rajesh Khanna plays a cook who helps a squabbling joint family patch up their differences: Raghu the bawarchi is so skilled that even when there are only kachche kelay (raw bananas) and suran (yam) in the house, he comes up with an innovative recipe for kababs. The Sharma family, their stomachs pampered, can’t stay discontented for long. And no wonder the old patriarch, when he hears of the cook’s arrival, jokingly mutters “Call everybody. For them, God has arrived.”