The Lunchbox

Film (2013)
Written and directed by Ritesh Batra

With Irrfan Khan (Saajan Fernandes), Nimrat Kaur (Ila), Nawazuddin Siddiqui (Shaikh)

The story is not involved, but it is potent. Ila (Nimrat Kaur) is neglected by her husband and she can’t figure out what’s going on. As part of the Indian lunch ritual, she sends a daily lunchbox via the Dabbawallas, the Mumbai lunchbox brigade, intended for her husband, but which, through misdirection, goes to Saajan (Irrfan Khan). Notes begin to appear coming and going and we get a sense of growing connection that survives through this charmingly unlikely method.

Concurrently, Saajan, who is soon planning to retire, must train his replacement, Shaikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), a somewhat daunting task with post professional and personal implications. The story develops believably and poignantly to an ending which, in its poetry, is both unsettling and deeply satisfying.

What a fabulous script and what amazing acting on the part of these three leads.

Irrfan Khan, as we know him from miscellaneous other ventures, has a kind of dour deadpan that can mask a brilliantly beating heart; that is no exception here. He exhibits all the hope, anguish, despair and passion that come with his mature station and the discovery of a potential tenderness. With relatively little gesticulation, he gives a command performance, heartbreaking in its range and implications.

Nimrat Kaur is at once radiant and muted, quietly graceful and intermittently boisterous. Her gentle moments of reflective despair and hopeful connection are punctuated by an ongoing chatter with her unseen Auntie, who she communicates with through her kitchen window. It is a spicily sweet and funny seasoning for what could have been a more singularly sullen character, a fine and interesting choice in the writing and direction.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Shaikh, Saajan’s prospective replacement at work, plays a great eager beaver with a complicated back story. Khan’s portrayal of a somewhat reluctant older guide and Siddiqui’s all too ambitious youth interweave to produce a moving outcome.

Set in the hubbub of Mumbai, the lunchbox carriers, the Dabbawallas, form a kind of social substrate for the drama, enabling one to get a sense of the complexity of the society in which such reliances and potential accidents occur. It is amazing to watch the transfer of this army of lunchboxes and to imagine that most of the millions of lunchboxes get to their destinations correctly. Apparently, Harvard Business School ran a study on the success of this operation in which only a very few lunchboxes – some like one in a million – go astray. It’s an amazing statistic and a wonderful film based on the extremely rare exception to the rule.

– BADMan