The Lunchbox

The Lunchbox is writer-director Ritesh Batra's feature debut, and while it is a minor effort, he displays an economical style and emotional generosity that demand further exploration. This Love Letters-like epistolary follows two lonely souls in overcrowded Mumbai who began a correspondence due to a wrongly delivered lunchbox. Irrfan Khan (Life of Pi) plays Saajan, a brittle and withdrawn widower nearing retirement, while Nimrat Kaur's Ila is a housewife who expresses her emotions through cooking. When the “perfect recipe” that Ila prepared for her neglectful husband accidentally goes to Saajan, they begin trading letters through the lunchbox, gradually opening up to reveal their fears and desires. Khan is one of the only living actors with enough gravitas to sell a character this contrived, and there is an interesting portrait of Indian working life on the fringes, but it's all too quaint.