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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