Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLG-R6KK8Dk
The Lunch Box
Opens tomorrow!:
Middle class housewife Ila is trying once again to add some spice to her marriage, this time through her cooking. She desperately hopes that this new recipe will finally arouse some kind of reaction from her neglectful husband. She prepares a special lunchbox to be delivered to him at work, but, unbeknownst to her, it is mistakenly delivered to another office worker, Saajan, a lonely man on the verge of retirement. Curious about the lack of reaction from her husband, Ila puts a little note in the following day's lunchbox, in the hopes of getting to the bottom of the mystery.
This begins a series of lunchbox notes between Saajan and Ila, and the mere comfort of communicating with a stranger anonymously soon evolves into an unexpected friendship. Gradually, their notes become little confessions about their loneliness, memories, regrets, fears, and even small joys. They each discover a new sense of self and find an anchor to hold on to in the big city of Mumbai that so often crushes hopes and dreams. Still strangers physically, Ila and Saajan become lost in a virtual relationship that could jeopardize both their realities.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/movies/the-lunchbox-a-bollywood-anomaly-comes-to-america.html?_r=0
An Indian Appetizer, Subtly Spiced
‘The Lunchbox,’ a Bollywood Anomaly, Comes to America
NEW DELHI — Mumbai is one of cinema’s great divas. She storms onto the screen with blasts of color, noise and music. She can be beautiful, with ocean views and stunning tableaus. And she can be ugly, her slums among the world’s worst.
Not surprisingly, this great megacity has spawned a film industry as over the top as it is, with movies that clutch viewers by the throat and assault them with glamour, pizazz and dancing. Lots of dancing.
So it is a rare event when a quiet movie of unexpressed anguish and yearning emerges from this brash city. “The Lunchbox“ opens in the United States on Friday, with a small story about the fragile connection between an aging widower smelling his own mortality and a despairing young housewife that offers American audiences an unusually accessible portrait of the sometimes desperate lives of urban middle-class Indians.
Ritesh Batra, the film’s writer and director, said in an interview that he scrawled “Less is more” across his own dog-eared copy of the film’s script, an unusual exhortation for a Bollywood product.
“These characters have such a hard time expressing themselves, except to each other in letters,” Mr. Batra said. “When you have people like that, less is always going to be more.”
That aesthetic pervades the film. In a poignant moment, Ila, the lonely housewife, puts her face in her husband’s dirty shirt, and her expression is enough to signal her realization of his affair.
Irrfan Khan, the film’s star, said in an interview that “The Lunchbox” is the most important film to emerge from Bollywood in decades, because it is the first by an Indian director to win international acclaim. The movie won rave reviews at last year’s Cannes and Telluride film festivals, and it has done well in European markets in addition to being popular in India. “If Indian directors could come out with cinema that can engage the world audience, that would be a great leap,” Mr. Khan said. “But if we remain content in just addressing Indians and N.R.I.s” — nonresident Indians — “then we are just surviving.”
Mr. Khan is the rare top Bollywood star with international appeal. But he has done so almost exclusively through movies made by non-Indians, like “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Life of Pi” and “The Amazing Spider-Man.”
Whether “The Lunchbox” is the start of an Indian invasion of Hollywood by similar films is debatable. India is a thoroughly inward-looking country still consumed with its own vast diversity. It has 850 distinct languages, huge regional genetic differences and myriad cultures. And Bollywood is doing just fine here, thank you.
The film industry dominates the South Asian psyche in a way that Hollywood could only dream about. While an American could go weeks without seeing an image of George Clooney, most urban Indians would have trouble spending a few hours without setting eyes on a picture of Shah Rukh Khan.
So just as “The Lunchbox” may continue to be a rare export, Hollywood shows no signs of sidelining India’s movie industry in the way that it has elsewhere.
“When you look at the film industries in Europe, almost all their films are relegated to the festival market,” said Pragya Tiwari, editor of The Big Indian Picture, an online magazine. “The entire commercial market has been taken over by Hollywood. But in India, despite having Hollywood releases, we have not been overtaken by Hollywood. Our films still do better here.”
In a sign of the disconnect between Hollywood and Bollywood, the Film Federation of India chose a relative unknown, “The Good Road,” to compete in this year’s foreign-language Oscar category instead of “The Lunchbox.” (In the end “The Good Road” was not nominated.) Critics howled that the film board had missed a golden opportunity. In addition to being critically acclaimed, “The Lunchbox” had the Sony Pictures Classics promotional machinery to make it known to Oscar voters.
Mr. Batra got into a public spat with Supran Sen, the film federation’s secretary general, and despite a public apology still speaks about the snub with some bitterness. “Because the movie had succeeded in the international festival world, somehow in a lot of people’s eyes that made it less Indian,” he said. “The lines between patriotism and stupidity are very blurry.”
He has spent much of his adult life and received his film training outside India, so his movies may indeed be something other than purely Indian. For American audiences, that is probably a good thing.
At its heart, “The Lunchbox” is about the amazing dabbawallahs, who transport hot meals by Mumbai housewives to their deskbound husbands. A rare mix-up leads to a connection between a woman trying to woo her husband through his stomach and a testy insurance claims adjuster sliding toward early retirement. The two pass notes in the lunchbox.
Several nice touches reveal interesting aspects of Indian society. Close watchers will notice that the three main characters are from vastly different groups. Mr. Khan’s Sajaan is Catholic; Ila (Nimrat Kaur) is Hindu; and Sajaan’s potential replacement, Shaikh (played with ebullient fabulousness by Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is Muslim. Mr. Batra said the potpourri was mostly accidental, and Mr. Khan emphasized that religion played no role among its characters (a beguiling construct in a society still rived by religious differences).
The shouted relationship between Ila and her upstairs neighbor also gives the movie a sweet nostalgia. Air-conditioning now screens many urban residents, but some open-window communities still exist, despite scorching heat.
The film’s abrupt stop leaves the viewer uncertain about whether the story is tragic or comic. “The ending was the only thing I had to fight for with the producers,” Mr. Batra said. “I wanted that the movie should end in your hearts and minds.”
Without spoiling anything, Mr. Khan said he believed his character came out well. “When I dreamt of becoming an actor as a teenager, I imagined doing love stories,” he said. “I haven’t had many chances to do that, and this is a fantastic love story.”
A picture credit with an earlier version of this article misidentified who provided the film still of Irrfan Khan. It was Sony Pictures Classics, not the Telluride Film Festival.
Funmi Tofowomo Okelola
-In the absence of greatness, mediocrity thrives.
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