MOVIES
movies of the month The crux of this warm movie is a simple mistake in the delivery of a lunchbox, writes Murray James.
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In Mumbai, India, deliverymen with great ingenuity cross the clogged city every morning to deliver hot meals from housewives to husbands working in offices. The lunchbox delivery service has a long honourable history and mistakes are rare. Ila (Nimrat Kaur) decides to spice up her marriage by cooking a recipe with aphrodisiac ingredients to get her neglectful husband’s attention. But instead of it being delivered to his workplace office, the lunchbox is delivered to another office worker, Saajan (Irrfan Khan), a lonely man recovering from his wife’s death. Curious about her husband’s lack of response Ila places a note in the next day’s lunchbox, which again is received by Saajan. What follows is a series of lunchbox notes between the two strangers and a friendship is forged as they share their concerns, loneliness, hopes and plans for the future. In so doing they discover a new side of themselves through this virtual relationship and this in turn opens them up to change and new possibilities. Mumbai is India’s most populous city, with 18 million inhabitants, and provides a chaotic backdrop of congested streets and overcrowded trains and vehicles. People seem to be imprisoned in their apartment and office blocks and the central characters in the film seem boxed in, as if they are on conveyer belts of mundane expectation of modernity. The Lunchbox presents a fascinating kaleidoscope of Indian culture, with its colourful traditions, religion and class. The traditional lunchbox deliverymen, for example, known as the Dabbawallahs, some 5000 in number, are a hereditary group that has performed this service for more than 120 years. The billing of this non-Bollywood film by its promoters as a romantic comedy does not do the story justice. Rather it is a light drama that raises thoughtful themes about the changing face of modern India, sensitively evoked by director Ritesh Batra in his first major film. The issues in this movie were reflected in recent Indian general election results with an age-old ruling party defeated by a new party promising economic reform and a freeing up of stifling bureaucracy. Both Ila and Shaikh, a young colleague of Ila’s husband, represent in this film the yearning of a younger, aspirational generation, desperately wanting these changes. One hopes that some of this may be fulfilled in the continuing story of the world’s largest democracy. Murray James is an RN in the Mood Disorders Unit at St John of God Health Services, Burwood. IN CINEMAS JULY 10