The Lunch Box - A Critical Analysis

A CRITICAL ANALYSIS

BY

MARISA ALEXANDER & RINISSE LORD

Plot and Story Synopsis

Plot and Story Synopsis

The 'Lunch Box' is an epistolary romantic film, where the leading characters are Ila and Saajan. Ila is a young wife, who is trying to get the attention of her husband in order to ignite the spark between them once again. She tries to do so through her cooking, as she prepares new recipes which will arouse some reaction from her neglectful husband. After Ila prepares the lunch box with hopes that her husband will receive it, it is mistakenly delivered via Mumbai's dabbawallahs (couriers), to another office worker, Saajan, a claims officer who is on the verge of his retirement. 

When Ila realizes that someone else received the lunch box, she a puts a note in the lunchbox the following day to solve this mystery. This leads to an ongoing exchange of written correspondence between Saajan and Ila (which is proving beneficial enough for both of them that no attempt is made to correct the delivery mistake). They confesses their feelings of loneliness, their memories, their fears, their regrets and their joys. After numerous notes, an unexpected friendship and relationship strike up between them.  As the lunchbox goes back and forth, this fantasy becomes so elaborate that it threatens to overwhelm their reality. They exist on the line between the Mumbai of reality and the Mumbai of fantasy. In the end, they come to a crossroads where they must choose between the two worlds.  

Setting: Description and Analysis

Setting

The film is set against the the hustle and bustle of Mumbai, India in 2012, and it explores Mumbai’s 99.9% accurate lunchbox delivery system, known as the dabbawalas. As the film begins the shots of the rain in the morning signifies the chaos and the early morning atmosphere. Ila’s location is mostly at her home from the kitchen, the bedroom or looking out the window to converse with her woman upstairs, whom she calls 'Auntie'.

On the other hand, Saajan’s location is within various places from his disciplined office during the day, to the overcrowded train, to the graveyard to visit his wife and then to his home. The way the train is packed with people, especially most times Saajan is standing in the train; this portrays the busy nature of the city. People throughout Mumbai are rushing to get to and from work.

Main Characters

Nimrat Kaur plays Ila, a middle-class housewife battling tedium at home, attentive to her daughter, but deeply unsatisfied with her neglectful and passive husband, who's mysteriously preoccupied with his phone to appreciate his wife's warm presence. As such, Ila consults her 'Auntie' to create new and vibrant dishes in hopes of reviving her husband's heart through his tastebuds. However, it was mistakenly delivered to someone else.

Irrfan Khan plays Saajan, a widower who is on the verge of retirement from an accounting firm. He lives a routinely lonely and and anti-social life both at home and at work which makes him somewhat of a scrooge, until the day that he mistakenly received a lunchbox which was not his. 

Secondary Characters

Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays Shaikh. While he is a secondary character, throughout the film his presence is very important to Saajan and Ila’s lives and relationship. Despite Shaikh has had a rough life whilst growing up, his current happiness with his wife and his eagerness to learn add value to his character and the film.

Bharati Achrekar plays 'Aunty', a formidable and funny character whom we never see but hears throughout the film. She gives the female lead advice on cooking and how to handle the situation that she has found herself in. 

Context Analysis

Context Analysis

This film (The Lunchbox) is based on the lunchbox delivery service in India, where the (dabbawallahs) delivers approximately 350,000 home cooked lunches to middle class office workers each day. This service was launched in 1954 by Dhondiba Medge, who was the first chairman of the Tiffin Box Suppliers Charity Trust of Mumbai. 

In an interview with the Business of Cinema, the director Ritesh Batra of the Lunchbox film stated that the orginal intent was to produce a documentary on the dabbawallahs back in 2007. However, after spending time with several of the dabbawallahs, and studying their work, Batra decided to make the storyline more interesting with a film instead of a documentary. According studies conducted at the Harvard University, the lunchbox delivery system never makes a mistake; the lunchbox is always delivered to the right person. On the contrary, this film portrays such mistake, when one lunchbox is delivered to the wrong person which turns out to be a love that blossoms between Ila and Saajan.

As the film continues to unfolds, a relationship brews between Ila and Saajan through the sharing of letters, until they decide to meet face to face. On the contrary, in a traditional Indian home, the wife may not want to risk going against the marriage to find love somewhere else. The lunchbox depicts how women today, express their bravery in search for what they want; in this film it is shown through the search of romance. Women in today’s society believe in what they want and will seek to find it.

Thematic Analysis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJIGJtb_N7E

Many themes are explored and displayed in "The Lunchbox'. Some of the major ones are love, courage,optimism, dissatisfaction, loneliness, hardship and culture to name a few.

Loneliness seems to be the focal point, the basis among all the characters we are introduced to. Sajaan, being a widower with no friends at work or family and on the verge of early retirement, is the epiphany of an old hermit. He is not well liked both at home or at work and his mundane life is the same routine daily. 

Ila, in her deteriorating marriage, constantly and unsuccessfully seeks company, attention and love from her husband. Once her daughter leaves for school, she is left on her own and often converses with "Aunty" who we never see. 

"Aunty" is lonely in her space also, as she religiously continues to take care of her ailing and bed-ridden husband, a job she has been doing  for over  fifteen years. Her love for music is her natural escape from her reality.

Shaikh is the newcomer at work and an orphan, He constantly seeks friendship and acceptance. Because of this need, he nags his way into Sajaan's life as he realizes that they are both missing parts of their lives. 

Love and courage were also major themes which illustrated how they can transform the unlikeliest of people as they broke down Sajaan's walls of hostility and lonesomeness and it gave Ila the courage to break free of her traditional duty to husband and family in order to find her own happiness. 

Loneliness and dissatisfaction are also portrayed as each of the characters displayed such. Ila is the lonely housewife who is unfulfilled and Sajaan is the loner who comes out of denial at the end of the movie as it relates to his lifestyle. He blatantly shows how one can be surrounded by lots of people and still be lonely.

How can something as trivial and novel as a lunchbox  bind these characters who are overcome and surrounded with negativity and adversity?  Fate and food are the culprits here. Simply by depicting  the harsh realities of life, the writer illustrates loneliness in a normal, beautiful and expressive way. The agony that each character experiences contributes immensely to the drama and reality of the film. They touch and affect each others lives and inspire each other to make the significant changes. 

The film was quite successful in illustrating it messages as they were delivered against a backdrop of reality and plain and simple human nature. It depicted independence in a traditional yet modern way and climaxed with the audience left to visualize or create their own personal endings. 

The Lunchbox was a refreshing film, filled with reality based and everyday situations which made it very easy to relate to. It gave us some insight into the remarkable lifestyle of Mumbai's lunch delivery system. The characters were very likable and captivating in their own special ways and were amazingly attuned to each other although we never see them meet. 

Conflict Analysis

Conflict Analysis

Both the main characters in 'The Lunchbox' experience internal  conflict. Ila is the housewife who is bred and lives by the Hindu culture to dutifully stay with her husband and support her family despite what. She is burdened by the thought her husband is having an affair, while also worrying about taking care of her ailing father, a job that would normally fall to the son of the family, except that he has committed suicide. Her mother is unable to meet the medical expenses and this falls on Ila's shoulders. He eventually dies and her mother confesses to her that she was unhappy for most of her marriage. This gives Ila a certain amount of courage and strength to break free of propriety.

Once Ila has discovered her husband’s affair she starts daydreaming about taking her daughter, Yashvi  away with her to Bhutan (the tiny Himalayan country far to the east of Mumbai, between India and China) in hopes of finding a better, happier and independent life there.

Saajan on the other hand, who, as we have established, is on the verge of retirement which indicates that he is somewhat 'old', fights internally with that same belief, after they decide to meet  at the restaurant where they planned to meet for the first time. 

 

His age conflict is heightened even more after he goes to the restaurant and sees Ila. In turn, he does not present himself to her but writes her a letter telling her of his fears and anxieties as they relate to their age difference. She responds by sending an empty lunchbox the next day. As a result of this conflict, Sajaan opted to break off the 'relationship' with Ila. He feels he has little to live for in Mumbai so he set off on a train for a new life in Nashik (another city in western India, about 100 miles away).  He has a change of heart, though, deciding that he’s given up too easily on the possibility of a connection with Ila so he returns.

External conflict is portrayed as the film doubles as an allegorical portrait of Mumbai in the midst of profound change. The two main characters are Christian  and Hindu, and that the loneliness that unites them is far more than the sum of their differences. They clearly belong to different social groups and crave what the other has. Sajaan lives in Christian neighborhood where he chases children away and Ila belongs to a middle-class Hindu community which isolates her as she is trapped in a loveless marriage and without a job to get her out of the house. 

Non Verbal/ Technical Elements Analysis

The use of non-verbal communication is probably one of the most critical highlights of the film, especially with Saajan.  Many shots are taken of him having lunch and his varying expressions, from the first time he received the mistaken lunchbox to even when it came empty one day, charms the audience without any form of dialogue. We are immersed in how he savors every bit of food, how he looks at the food,  and we can tell what he is thinking without him having to say a word.

We get so used to his stony-faced demeanor that it was a pleasant surprise to see him developing smiles, subtle at first, during the course of the film. This technique assisted in getting in tune with the character's emotions and feelings. His posture, facial expressions and glaring eye contact emanate a superior and aloof yet lonely personality. The first we see of his softer personality was when he opens the lunchbox for the first time and it continued to dominate him during the course of the film.

As it relates to Ila, we are left to fend on our own and wonder about why her husband is neglecting her. Of course, infidelity is an option but it may also have been the pressures of work. There are several scenes where she is washing his clothes and keeps smelling them, as she is uncertain as to the reason for his neglect as well. However, the one memorable scene where she smelled his clothes over and over because she got a different scent, confirms what both we the audience and Ila fear.

In this film, the absence of words  from the characters speak as much and as loudly as dialogue. It excels in communicating non-verbally to the audience.

The most intriguing form of non-verbal communication and of most significance throughout the film came in the form of written letters. Like the characters, the content of the letters developed as the film progressed. From a simple one-liner to heart-felt pouring of emotions between the two main characters, the letters give them time to feel, to react to each other, to change and to grow. They  also invoke a range of emotions between the characters which are quite visible from their expressions while reading. In addition, the letters have captured the curiosity and anxiety of both the audience and the characters as we all wait with abated breaths to 'hear' the letters' contents.