The Lunch­box

Two thoughts instant­ly came to mind after view­ing Ritesh Batra’s The Lunch­box. The first was, how long before Hol­ly­wood gets their greasy mitts on this one? The sec­ond was, just how bad­ly will the fuck it up? As in the art of gas­tron­o­my, you could give two peo­ple the exact same ingre­di­ents and one will pro­duce a delec­table dish which leaves your taste­buds pos­i­tive­ly hum­ming, while the oth­er will deliv­er a nox­ious slur­ry at which even the live­stock will like­ly turn up their snouts.

The film runs with a dead­ly sim­ple con­cept, one which harks right back to movies like Ernst Lubitsch’s mas­ter­piece, The Shop Around the Cor­ner, or more recent­ly, will they/won’t they heart­warm­ers such as Sleep­less In Seat­tle. Saa­jan is a griev­ing wid­ow­er who is count­ing down the days before his retire­ment as a gov­ern­ment pen-push­er in Mum­bai. His only respite us a Tow­er-Of-Piza-like lunch­box placed on his desk at the same time dai­ly. One day, the food deliv­ered is not the sub-par grot dished out by his local eatery, but some seri­ous­ly impres­sive home cooking.

It tran­spires that the Dab­bawalas — a sham­bling net­work of men who ride the rail and hand-deliv­er lunch­box­es from kitchens to offices and pro­fess to have a secret sys­tem which nev­er fails — have start­ed to deliv­er the wrong lunch, and what he is acci­den­tal­ly receiv­ing is the tasty treats lov­ing­ly pre­pared by Ila, a bored house­wife and moth­er who is try­ing to win back her dis­in­ter­est­ed hus­band via his gul­let. When the pair cot­ton on to what’s hap­pen­ing, they strike up a fast com­mu­nion through high­ly per­son­al let­ters. Ini­tial­ly, these scrib­bled tes­ti­monies are used as oppor­tu­ni­ties to vent the man­i­fold frus­tra­tions of their lives, until even­tu­al­ly things reach the point where they decide it would be best for them to meet on neu­tral ground.

The great thing about The Lunch­box is that there is a lot that poten­tial­ly could have gone wrong but nev­er does. The char­ac­ter of Ila (as played by Nim­rat Kaur) is ini­tial­ly pre­sent­ed as a hap­py-clap­py house­wife whose sole pur­pose in life is to tend to her dis­in­ter­est­ed hub­by. Batra’s writ­ing doesn’t do any­thing unto­ward, such as hav­ing her trans­form into a man hat­ing mani­ac, but instead traces her slow real­i­sa­tion that she is mer­ci­less­ly trapped inside her life rather than con­trol­ling its for­ward momen­tum. Her impuls­es are catal­ysed by the belief that her hus­band is hav­ing an affair, and Batra’s choice to nev­er con­firm this sus­pi­cion cre­ates an ambigu­ous sense of para­noia and hushed desperation.

The top trump, though, is Irrfan Khan, who proves here that he may be one of the great­est liv­ing actors in the world right now. There’s a Keaton-esque trim of sad­sack dead­pan to his per­for­mance as Saa­jan, which is drawn out and mod­u­lat­ed beau­ti­ful­ly via the inter­ac­tions with his lap­dog office col­league, Shaikh (Nawazud­din Sid­diqui). His light­ly tac­i­turn demeanour cloaks the oceans of pain, and Khan man­ages to chan­nel it beau­ti­ful­ly with­out ever stat­ing it too bluntly.

As with the Dabbawalas’s method, mar­riage is that sacred, para­dox­i­cal insti­tu­tion which defies the nature of human desire and yet it some­thing that, appar­ent­ly, just works. More than a tale of ran­dom hearts con­nect­ing through fast food deliv­ery, this is a heart­break­ing movie about things that won’t and don’t and can’t go wrong, going seri­ous­ly wrong. It’s a film which deserves to be played in a dou­ble bill with Satya­jit Ray’s 1963 mas­ter­piece of mar­i­tal bliss gone awry, The Big City.