Monday, June 30, 2014

Review: The Lunchbox (Ritesh Batra, 2013)

Written and directed by Ritesh Batra, The Lunchbox screened at the International Critics Week at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and won the Critics Week Viewers Choice Award. Both sessions at the Sydney Film Festival sold out and it seems primed for quiet word-of-mouth success. The Lunchbox is a genuine crowd-pleasing romance, a pleasant and moving study of two isolated individuals who, by chance, find unexpected comfort in one another, and a distraction from their unsatisfying lives, through the sharing of delicious food and honest letter correspondence.


The premise for The Lunchbox is drawn from India’s extraordinarily efficient lunch delivery system. Couriers, known as Dabbawala’s, collect lunch boxes of hot food from restaurants or the residences of workers, deliver them to their workplace using a variation of bicycles and trains, before returning the empty boxes to their point of origin the very same afternoon. I watched on in awe; looked like a logistical nightmare but they are world-renowned for their organization and accuracy.

This heartwarming film, which transports a viewer to the hustle and bustle of contemporary India, tells the story of a rare casualty of the delivery system, and how the lives of two people; one a lonely accountant nearing retirement (Irrfan Khan, Slumdog Millionaire, Life of Pi), the other a young housewife (the beautiful Nimrat Kaur, The Peddlers) looking to win back her husband’s attention, were changed as a result.

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