"The Lunchbox" is a movie built around the lunchbox delivery men in Mumbai. There are about 5,000 of them called the dabbawallahs who, without any technology, run
arguably India's most efficient and trusted business. Every working
day, for more than 125 years, they have transported hundreds of
thousands of midday lunches back and forth from home kitchens and
restaurants to office workers in the world's fourth most densely
populated city. The lunches come in from all over
by train, bus and bicycle into central clearing areas and are magically
dispersed, like a low tech illiterate FedEx. Harvard Business School
commissioned a six-month study of the service in 2010 that showed only one in a million deliveries go awry.
In
"The Lunchbox" one goes awry. An unhappy, yearning housewife makes a
special lunch to stimulate her passive husband's interest and it goes
to the wrong man, an older man in his declining years. Like a message in
a bottle, two total strangers connect and a gentle, sweet relationship
of mystery and fantasy develops. The lunchbox goes back and forth with
increasingly personal messages as the difficult realities of their lives
conflict more and more with their hopes and dreams mediated by the
lunchbox. There is nothing innovative or surprising about the story; it
follows a very predictable pattern (until its annoying ending, which is
a surprise) but it is a thoroughly enjoyable study of two attractive,
sincere people struggling with their problems in isolation with the
growing, joining influence of the errant lunchbox. Some minor characters
complement the basic story nicely. The male lead, Irrfan Khan, was in
Slumdog and played the adult Pi; he is quite good. The female lead, Nimrat
Kaur, is the stable focal point for the story that has a lot of
personal distractions pulling at the attentions of the other characters.
It is her first real film and she is terrific.
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