Sweet Indian "Lunchox" sets off a Spicy Oscar Controversy
By Alex Deleon-Sinha
"The Lunchbox" is a sweet new Indian Love Story that has set off a hot controversy over the Indian Oscar entry for 2014 when the director Ritesh Batra publicly questioned the integrity of the Indian Film Federation for selecting a different picture, "The Good Road" as this years official indian Oscar submission. Despite widespread press and industry condemnation of the Selection committee choice Batra was compeled to make a public apology which he did with greatbreservation.
The Lunchbox, set in Mumbai, revolves around a mistaken delivery by the Dabbawalas (lunchbox service) of Mumbai, which leads to a relationship between Saajan, (Irrfan Khan) a lonely widower close to retirement, and Ila, an unhappy housewife (sublime Nimrat Kaur) as they start exchanging intimate messages inside of the daily lunchbox delivery cans. Ritesh's "lunchbox" is far more subtle and generally far superior to its distant 1998 American cousin, "You've got mail" with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan)
The basic situation: A man who has been grieving since the death of his wife and a woman who is trying to rekindle her philandering husband's love with her gourmet culinary skills by having fantastic lunches sent to his office. Her plan might have worked if the famous lunch delivery men of Bombay known as 'dabbawalas' had not for once in a blue moon screwed up by mistakenly delivering the daily delicacies to the wrong person, at a HIS company desk. . The mistaken lunch delivery becomes the vehicle for an accidental "pen-pal" love affair of increasingly touching proportions. This is definitely off-Bollywod fare with no songs and dances, and would have been classied as "Parallel Cinema" twenty year ago. Today it rather typifies a new direction toward serious cinema that is slowly gathering steam in Tinseltown, Mumbai.
The film had all kinds of European financial backing, but Irrfan Khan and Nawaz Siddiqui -- in a typical juicy supporting role --are both Bollywood character actor stalwarts, and one of the producers is Anurag Kashyap of "Gangs of Wasseyput".
The sublimely beauitiful actress Nimrat Kaur, is an amazing new revelation, and will probably be cast in some more typical musical Bollywoid blockbuster soon, even if she is almost too ethereal to do one of those kinds of pictures. I was enthralled by her and am now curious to see what some typical kool Bollywood director may do with her next. In Bollywood you just never know ...
Lunchbox starts off very slow -- is almost boring for the first half hour, but picks up steam once sly impish Nawazuddin Siddiqui comes onto the scene and then winds up becoming a romantic cliffhanger -- (will the virtual lovers ever get together, or not!) -- one of the most unusual movies to come out of Bombay in recent years.
Irrfan Kan who was the brutal sadistic policeman in "Slumdog Millionaire", has gradually moved up from offbeat by-player bits to serious leading man roles in a tastily accruing middle-age. In "Lunchbox" he has the dignity and other qualities of an Indic edition of Hollywood golden-age leading man Ronald Coleman!
"The Lunchbox" is the debut feature of 34 year old director Ritesh Batra whose earlier short films have won numerous awards. Lunchbox premiered at Cannes 2013 and gathered more attention at such prestige festivals as Telluride and Toronto. It was generally considered a shoo-in for Oscar consideration but the unexpected federation choice of a much more obscure film from Guarat Province has been roundly condemned by many leading Bollywood personalities, among them celebrity directors Karan Johar and Anurag Kashyap.
India has never won a Best Foreign Language Film Award in Hollywood and Lunchbox was by far the best candidate to finally bring home the bacon. This is undoubtedly a big dissapointment for relatively young director Batra, but will very likely serve as the stepping stone to a highly promising career.
Irrfan Khan has some intriguing mail in his lunch box from a beautiful woman he's never met ...
