Review Tales

If you live in a bustling city, you understand what it feels like to escape the banality of the clamor. In all the commotion, you are constantly surrounded by strangers, yet you must keep your head down and tune it all out. Eventually, one gets tired of the hustle and bustle. There comes that need to get out of there, to find a genuine human connection.

The Lunchbox embodies that sentiment so brilliantly for me. Aside from being a romance drama, it plays out as a day-in-the-life exploration of what it means to exist in modern society. Mumbai and its crowded denizens are alive and pulsating here; it feels like there are real things going on, unlike some movies that have their cities be arbitrary bubbles with no impact on its dwellers.

There are two significant devices at play here: the epistolary platform of which this love affair plays out, and then the titular lunchbox itself as a macguffin. By choosing to tell the romance in epistolary form, it heightens how our two lovers are yearning for a profound connection and a simpler time – much like the painstaking process of writing a letter in correspondence.

Earlier I mentioned macguffin, but I mean that not in a derogatory manner. The plot is triggered when a young wife sends lunch to her husband at work through a lunchbox delivery system – until a mixup occurs and that lunchbox is delivered to a widower on the verge of retiring as an accountant. As a macguffin, the wife’s lunchbox gives the story direction and the characters drive. The lunchbox becomes a stand-in for infidelity, yearning, nourishment, desire, escapism, communication and miscommunication. The late great Irrfan Khan plays the widower with such subtlety and nuance to make Paul Thomas Anderson beam, it hits harder knowing that he is no longer with us!

But the movie isn’t content on just giving us lunchboxes and letters to tell its love story. The editing, scene transitions and sound design all express the isolation, ennui and longing of the characters. There’s one shot of a fan in the wifes house, which cuts straight to the widower’s office’s fan. We FEEL these two characters coming closer and closer to each other with each conversation – the edit guides this burgeoning relationship as each cut gets progressively more rapid. Its cinema of a universal language.

Moreover, The Lunchbox is lowkey a deconstruction of rom-coms that only duplicate When Harry Met Sally‘s tired formula. You know how every single one of these rom-coms have THAT moment when the lovers split at the midpoint? All because of some arbitrary misunderstanding that could easily have been resolved if they were honest with each other or just a simple discussion? The Lunchbox subverts that by first of all having characters act like y’know actual human beings that don’t frustrate you to no end! How about when the rom-com archetypal characters realize their mistake and now one of them runs through the pouring rain to stop the wedding or stop that flight from taking off? Again The Lunchbox does a 180 and denies us that simplistic resolution. What about that token friend of the main characters (usually Black, Asian or LGBTQ) who is just a mouthpiece to give the protagonist advice on what they already know deep down? Well the token friends in this movie are Asian (obviously) but they have actual character; they have their own internal struggles that doesn’t detract from the main romance plotline; they have understandable goals and aspirations….more importantly they’re not just there to tell the main character what we the audience are screaming!

If you’re looking for a heartfelt, unconventional 21st century love story, The Lunchbox is a fantastic treat served warm. It does what many rom-coms and dramas fail to do: to get us to want two people to come together in spite of their diametrically opposed circumstances.

I can’t believe this was writer-director Ritesh Batra’s debut feature film! He came fully formed with strong Wong Kar Wai energy!