Lunch Box Review

The Lunch Box – An Immensely Joyous and Heartwarming Experience. Unmissable!

Rating: ****

Ila’s mornings are taken up readying her little daughter for school. Her husband Rajesh has already left for office, and her duty for the day is to make lunch for him. The family lives in the busy Bombay city, so vast and congested it’s impossible to come home for lunch. She packs his food in a lunch box and waits for a dabbawala to carry it to his office. Whether by a simple mistake or by fate, it reaches the wrong address one day. That day, she’s especially keen on getting Rajesh’s approval – she took her neighbor’s help to make a special dish for him. She gets back her dabba polished off empty, and is elated thinking Rajesh has loved her food. When he reaches home at evening, she’s surprised when he says nothing about her dish and walks straight to the bedroom to rest. She musters up her slightly crestfallen spirit and asks him whether he liked the food. His response: “Yeah… The aloo gobi was good”. She realizes there’s been a mix-up.

The lunch, her ‘special’ dish, reaches the office table of Mr. Fernandez, a cheerless unsmiling middle-aged employee of a government insurance company who is to retire and be replaced in one month. He reminds of Tommy Lee Jones’ character from the film Hope Springs, or Tommy Lee Jones the actor himself at award shows.

He unpacks the tiffin and is delighted by the whiff of tasty food. He digs in, and consumes every last bit of his yummy lunch. After work, he stops by at the restaurant that usually sends him lunch, informs them to stop sending food after a month, and leaves after complimenting them for the lunch they’d sent that day. The owner looks puzzled for a moment, and surmises that ‘it’s aloo-gobi that’s finally worked for him’. They send nothing but aloo-gobi thereafter, except that it lands at Ila’s husband’s office. He doesn’t suspect anything, and assumes his wife is cutting down on household expenses. His marriage life is as plain and dry as aloo-gobi, and he’s m.i.a most of the time. In the film’s latter half, he’s totally absent, probably lying in the arms of his paramour. Debut director Ritesh Batra’s The Lunch Box, which won the Critics Week Viewers Choice Award at Cannes Film Festival, is all about Ila and Fernandez, the letters they share in which they pour their littlest to profoundest feelings, recall memories of fading past, narrate experiences of the present, and wonder about their future. Shall they meet one day? Shall this special relationship amount to love?

What makes their relationship unique and everlasting is the distance. I’m reminded of Bridges of Madison County, where Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep’s characters find the perfect companions in one another in a matter of four days, except she’s married and chooses responsibility towards her family over everything else. In The Lunch Box, the two characters don’t even know how the other looks. There’s only the old-fashioned mode of letter-writing (albeit stuffed in lunch-boxed along-with rotis) and the contents within that give an insight of their extraordinary bond. The amazingly lyrical quality of their interactions captured by an especially arresting camerawork transports you into their lives, allowing you to feel their presence, laugh with them and to be one with them as they share genuinely delightful and touching experiences, mainly in their letters. The story moves forward serenely and unrushed, never turning back for a flashback, never opting for jerky camera movements, never taking an implausible angle even with all the uniqueness in the plot. There are conversations dealing with suicide, loneliness and aging but there’s also an incident about Fernandez thinking an old woman’s touched his junk only to realize it’s somebody’s bag that’s ‘fondling’ his privates. There’s little background score, only sounds of the city life, its characters and the dabbawalas singing together in the railway carriage.

The relationship between the film’s characters is so unique it’s worth a mention. We’re already aware of the special bond between Mr. Fernandez and Ila. Then there are Ila’s joyous interactions with her neighbor Mrs. Deshpande, who lives on the floor below hers. Mrs. Deshpande’s character is never seen in the film, and yet she share’s a great amount of screen-time. She talks to Ila from her window downstairs, gossiping with her about the letters sent from Mr. Fernandez, and recommending which ingredients to add in her dishes. When she hears that Mr. Fernandez didn’t thank Ila for the lunch she’s made for him after Ila reveals about the mix-up, and instead chooses to complain that the food is too salty, she sends red hot chillies to Ila through a pulley like device that connects the windows of their homes to put in the dish she’d make for him the next day.

Then there’s the extremely funny

and heartwarming relationship between Mr. Fernandez and Shaikh, the new employee who’s to replace him after his retirement. Shaikh is the exact opposite of Mr. Fernandez, highly optimistic and cheerful, and he’s eager to learn under Mr. Fernandez even when he’s been warned that he’ll get no help. As the film progresses, the two almost share a father-son relationship, and Mr. Fernandez also takes the blame for Shaikh’s blunder at work. Irrfan Khan and Nawazuddin Siddique give highly nuanced performances as Mr. Fernandez and Shaikh respectively, but leading lady Nimrat Kaur

is stilted at times instead of subtle. Her character’s going through a gamut of emotions (she’s thinking of escaping with someone she’s never seen, for god’s sake!) but Nimrat sometimes conveys a little to less for her own good. That is why I remembered Bridges of Madison County, and Meryl’s extremely subtle, spontaneous and natural performance as lonely woman Francesca. The character of Ila deserves a performance of that caliber, and Nirmal doesn’t live up to it.

Also, I felt the movie was unfair in giving her no confrontation scene with her husband, and lets him get away so easily. The movie ends up having too many ‘endings’ and unnecessarily prolongs by about ten-twelve minutes. It’s nevertheless a highly satisfying and deeply poignant experience that shouldn’t be missed.

ourvadodara.in Rating Guide:

* = Avoid!!

** = Rent It / TV Premiere

*** = Book The Cheapest Seats

**** = Book The Best Seats

***** = Book The Best Seats + Buy The DVD!