A Film : The Lunchbox at Asia-Pacific Film Festival awards.

The Lunchbox

डिब्बा

Directed by Ritesh Batra The Lunchbox, has nominations in six categories including Best Picture at this weekend's Asia-Pacific Film Festival awards.

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By Derek Elley

Mon, 20 May 2013, 13:40 PM (HKT)

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Hugely impressive feature debut, centred on an offbeat "romance", hardly puts a foot wrong. Festivals and niche theatrical.

Story

Mumbai, the present day. Every day housewife Ila (Nimrat Kaur) sees her young daughter Yashvi (Yashvi Puneet Nagar) off to school and then prepares a dabba(multi-tiered metal lunchbox) to be delivered to her husband Rajeev (Nakul Vaid) at his office via the huge network of dabbawalla. Trying to put some spice back into her stalled marriage, Ila takes special care over the food one day, with a little help from her upstairs neighbour Mrs. Deshpande (Bharati Achrekar), aka "Auntie". But thedabba is misdelivered and ends up on the desk of crusty widower Saajan Fernandes (Irrfan Khan), a pen-pusher in a govermment claims department who is about to retire after 35 years' immaculate service. When Rajeev doesn't react as expected to her cooking, Ila suspects he never got the dabba and next day puts a note inside it. A daily "correspondence" then develops between her and Saajan which starts to change both their lives. Saajan also becomes more tolerant of his eager-beaver office colleague Aslam Shaikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), whom he's been told to train to take over his job when he retires.

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Review

There's hardly a shot, line or gesture out of place in The Lunchbox, a hugely impressive feature debut by Mumbai-born, partly New York-based Ritesh BATRAthat starts out like a foodie film but spins a simple idea into a whole mini-universe of feelings. Beautifully cast, and packaged with a precision that doesn't constrain its emotional content, the film brings together — through notes delivered in a daily lunchbox — two lonely souls who would never have met in ordinary circumstances. On the one hand, there's Ila, an attractive young housewife in the conservative middle-class Hindu suburb of Kandivali, north of Mumbai, and on the other there's Saajan, a widowed government employee on the verge of retirement whose home is in the old neighborhood of Ranwar village, in the suburb of Bandra. When a lunchbox prepared by Ila for her husband is misdelivered one day to Saajan, a "correspondence" of secret notes grows between them that starts as a discussion of her tasty cooking but develops into a virtual relationship that proves life-changing for both.

The special joy of the film is not only writer-director Batra's light touch with the material but also the surprising fact that he manages to develop the idea beyond just a glorified short. Ila is barely seen outside the flat she shares with her daughter and husband but is none the less constrained as a character: the device of her chatting through the window with an unseen woman neighbour in the flat above (spacily voiced by Bharati ACHREKAR) imbues her scenes with plenty of comic moments, and a curiously sensuous scene of her trying to re-arouse her husband's interest is enough to show the stasis of their marriage. Saajan's life is equally circumscribed by routine: from home to office (where he's a cog in a government machine) and back home again, where he spends evenings alone and stares at a happy family having dinner in the house opposite.

It's the introduction of the third main character, Aslam, whom Saajan is told to train to take over his job, which really helps develop the initial idea into feature length. Skilfully played by theatre-film actor Nawazuddin SIDDIQUI (the intelligence chief inKahaani and dope-smoking gangster son in Gangs of वासेपुर (Wasseypur)), Aslam starts as an intensely annoying distraction, morphs into a sympathetic character in the space of one superbly written canteen scene, and builds a father-son-like relationship with Saajan that liberates them both without distracting from the core relationship between Saajan and Ila.

As Ila, radiant theatre actress Nimrat KAUR (Peddlers Halaahal) suggests the most with the minimum effort, as equally does veteran Irrfan KHAN as Saajan, a lifetime bureaucrat whose safe and orderly universe is challenged first by Ila and her mouth-watering cooking and then by the loose-cannon Aslam. Both Khan and Kaur convey more in a look or an action (she preparing the daily lunchbox, he carefully taking out his spectacles) than Siddiqui's Aslam does in pages of garrulous dialogue; but the mix of the three is what keeps the movie motoring.

With its will-they/won't-they finale, The Lunchbox is almost a very low-key rom-com. But director Batra again defies expectations here, delivering instead a beautifully pure love-story-by-correspondence that packs quite an emotional punch at the end. The closing reel could be a little tighter, and there's a slightly distracting "western" feel to the whole enterprise that marks it as a festival movie. But otherwise the pacing is as immaculate at the technical package, highlighted by the saturated widescreen photography by US d.p. Michael SIMMONDS (Man Push Cart, Paranormal Activity 2(2010)) of Mumbai and its suburbs in all their moods, and the smooth editing of John LYONS (The Aspern Papers).

For the record, Mumbai's 5,000 dabbawalla have been delivering the multi-tiered metal lunchboxes (dabba) for over a century, using a coding system that seems chaotic but results in only one misdelivery in a million.Filmbizasia