'The Lunchbox': A romance with depth
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
[Grade: B] What could have been a saccharine rom-com about a lonely, embittered widower and a neglected housewife brought together by a meet-cute contrivance, is instead a contemplative drama about the inevitable passage of time.
City Paper grade: B
Perhaps the highest compliment that can be paid to writer/director Ritesh Batra is that The Lunchbox astutely avoids becoming the film that its synopsis threatens. What could have been a saccharine rom-com about a lonely, embittered widower and a neglected housewife brought together by a meet-cute contrivance, is instead a contemplative drama about the inevitable passage of time.
Irrfan Khan, on whose shoulders the film essentially rests, plays Saajan, a Mumbai accountant on the verge of retirement who seems content to unassumingly run out his days in the office and fade into invisibility. He receives the same mediocre lunch on a daily basis from a dabbawalla, India’s famed lunchbox delivery service. A mix-up leads to his receiving meals from Ila (Nimrat Kaur), a young woman attempting to regain her distracted husband’s attention via her home cooking. The mismatched pair strike up a correspondence through the daily delivery, leading to an almost-romance that both are initially wary of consummating.
Everything about that description should send up middlebrow red flags, but Batra wisely keeps his focus less on the burgeoning relationship between his two leads than on how this afternoon fantasy impacts their own individual lives. For Ila, this mystery man represents an escape from drudgery and provincialism, from a small apartment where her only companionship comes from the disembodied voice of her upstairs neighbor, who shouts down cooking tips from her window. For Saajan, it’s something even richer, a reconnection with his youth and his late wife, all tinged with the bittersweet knowledge that none of it can be recaptured. It reawakens painful memories, but
it also offers the emotional jolt that revisiting them can provide.
So much of their epistolary relationship aims toward cutesy “grumpy old man learns the true meaning of life” uplift or groan-inducing May-December romance that the more melancholy and ambiguous results come as a refreshing surprise. Their accidental meeting doesn’t solve all of their problems, but it does provide the escape of fantasy. Sometimes, Batra seems to imply, that's not only enough — it may even be preferable to any of the possible realities.
