A Critical Assessment of the The Lunch Box- Ritesh Batra - Movie Review Example

Critical assessment of the movie The Lunch Box- Ritesh Batra Name Institution Date The movie is set in the busy Mumbai city, partly romance partly comedy. The story is told in a subtle way just the way the people from India would tell of a story on how a relationship started with two strangers from a wrong delivery of a lunchbox. The movie starts showing the activities of an everyday housewife called Ila (Nimrat Kaur) who lives in Mumbai with her husband and daughter; it shows in detail how she goes through her daily activities which are based on how she prepares her only daughter for school in the morning. Thereafter, she engages in the activity of cooking lunch for her husband. This is where we first get the film title “The lunchbox”. We see how Ila prepares the food, which she does with the intention of seducing her husband through his stomach. She does it in the hope of reviving some romance in the marriage as we can later see that her husband barely talks to her and is always on the phone, we see in detail how she packs the carefully prepared food in the lunchbox and how the lunchbox is transported from the house to the office by men hired for that specific service and we see that ‘the lunchbox’ is finally delivered to the wrong person and not Ila’s husband. The movie also has an aspect of smart comedy where Ila’s neighbor , Barati Achrekar who we never see her face throughout the movie, and she refers her to simply as ‘Auntie’ helps in the preparation of the food by giving her spices that would help the food even taste better. She tells Ila that if her husband tastes the delicious food she has prepared for him, he will build her a Taj Mahal, Ila replies this by saying that “the Taj Mahal is a tomb.” After the wrong delivery of the lunchbox, we are introduced to the character of Mr. Fernandes (Irrfan Khan) who is a widower and works in the accounting department. Mr. Fernandes opens the lunchbox and is seduced by the smell and the taste of food and he eats everything that Ila had packed and returns the lunchbox empty. Ila is surprised when she finds the lunchbox empty and decides to ask her husband how the food was that evening after he came home from work. It is only after she tries talking with her husband who talked about a different food from what she had prepared that she started to suspect that her food might have gone to somebody else and not her husband. The following day, during her normal routine of preparing lunch, auntie suggests to Ila to attach a note in the lunch box to confirm if her suspicions are founded and the wrong person is eating her food. The lunch box is delivered to Mr. Fernandes and he reads the note. It is from his reply that we get to see Mr. Fernande’s detached attitude towards people and the lack of emotion in his reply to Ila’s note. He does not reply according to what we expect from a person eating someone else’s food which is obviously better from what his food would be. He instead sends a message saying that “The food was very salty today”. This message is not taken well by Ila and Auntie. Auntie suggests that she should add a lot of pepper in the following day’s food. From this first exchange of notes a friendship that is partly romantic grows. The lunchbox is always delivered in both sides with a note and Ila and Mr. Fernandes are always excited to receive the lunchbox. Both characters get to learn about each other’s life through notes that are in the lunchbox without ever meeting. Over time, Ila who feels neglected by her husband, gains confidence from the exchange with the stranger who gets her lunchbox and begins to share information about her life. The movie touched a lot of emotions through the notes in the lunchbox, there is a bit of melodrama when Ila wrote to Mr. Fernandes on how her brother committed suicide because he failed his exams. He also talks about his wife who is dead in the notes, he writes of how she used to watch comedies in the television and record them. All through the movie the delivery of the lunchbox to either of the two characters was based on a highlight of their day. The romance in the movie is subtle but we can see that through the continuous interaction of Ila and Mr. Fernandes, his heart slowly warms up to her and eventually he starts having romantic thoughts of Ila especially when he referred to her as his girlfriend to Shaikh, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, and his wife. Ila also mentioned moving with Mr. Fernandes to a new place towards the end in a letter, it is not clear whether she sends the letter to him or not. Towards the end of the movie, the ‘lunchbox concept’ was somehow lost because the movie was more focused on Saikh who was to be Mr. Fernandes replacement in the office when he retired. He is an orphan who makes many accounting mistakes but Mr. Fernandes helps him in retaining the job by covering up for him especially when he makes mistakes in calculating. An emotional side of Mr. Fernandes is evident as he helps his new colleague. Fernandes opens up more to Shaikh as time passes. A friendship develops and Saikh also gets to share Ila’s delicious food during lunch. The friendship grows to such a level that Mr. Fernandes agrees to go to Shaikh house to share dinner. He is the only one in Shaikh's side at his wedding. The movie develops many storylines along but just leaves loose ends that should have been developed more. The audience never gets to know what happens to Mr. Fernandes and Ila, and if they ever meet after the failed meeting because Mr. Fernandes thought he was too old. It would have been more satisfying if the audience got to see what happens after Mr. Fernandes left his job, who would have received the delicious food in the lunchbox on his behalf and if Ila’s husband would have finally known that he was getting the wrong lunchbox and stopped being so mad at Ila for delivering the preparing food every day. Also, in the movie, Ila discovered that her husband was cheating on her. We would have loved to see a confrontation between the two or if their marriage gets better or an apology and in the case of the worst case, a divorce or a simple separation. Even if Ila’s reasons for staying in the marriage were founded, she deserved better than a cheating husband who is not in any way suffering any repercussions. The audience would also have loved a detailed work on the workings of the men who were delivering the lunchboxes. It seemed very interesting on how they pick lunchboxes door to door and transported them via bicycles, then a crowded train back to a bicycle again and still delivered hot food on peoples desks on time despite the traffic congested environment and the hectic transportation means. In the movie, they say they were reviewed by Men who work from Harvard and saw that they don’t make mistakes and as such commended their services. As part of the audience, I would have loved to see in details how that happened. I would also have wanted to know why there was a mistake in Ila’s food delivery, did the husband lie about his work place or did the people who delivered the food make a mistake? Towards the end of the movie there is so much happening at a fast rate. It is expected that the producers give a more detailed account of events as was evident from the other parts of the movie. There are so many unanswered questions in the movie “The Lunchbox’’ that as part of the audience I think they should make a second lunchbox movie to tie all the loose ends left, there is a lot of story line to work with and they would finally satisfy the viewers by clearing the confusion and anticlimax that everyone was left with mostly on what became of the characters towards the end. For example the audience is left asking itself as to whether Ila delivered the last letter to Mr. Fernandes, also, Did she move to the said city? What became of her family? That part of the story in the movie leaves me with a feeling of an anticlimax. The movie was about the lunchbox and the lunchbox aspect should have been followed through to the end, this did not happen as we did not see what came of the lunchbox. Did it finally get delivered to the right person? Who was the next person to get the lunchbox? Read More