Romancefest 2015: The Lunchbox

All right, enough with the kids for now, let's have a grown up romance. Buzz in 2013 suggested India's THE LUNCHBOX would be a sure thing for Best Foreign Language film, but instead it wasn't even nominated. What gives, Academy?

THE LUNCHBOX tells the tale of an unsatisfied young housewife (Nimrat Kaur) and a lonely widowed man on the verge of retirement (Irrfan Khan) whose lives become intertwined when a lunchbox is mis-delivered.

The housewife has been preparing increasingly intricate and delicious lunches in an effort to get her distant husband's (Nakul Vaid) attention. The lunchbox delivery people pick it up in the morning, and begin accidentally delivering it to the wrong desk at the wrong office where the lonely widower is pleasantly surprised at the greatness of a lunch he thinks is coming from a food cart down the street.

Soon, the housewife realizes what's going on and starts including notes with the lunch. The widower starts writing back. As the notes become more involved, each of our characters opens up more about their lives, their dreams and their problems. Soon, a bond of love begins to grow, and the inevitable question of whether or not the housewife will leave her husband or whether or not the two note-writers will meet becomes unavoidable.

This is all very well done, and is heightened even more by a subplot involving the widower's fresh-faced replacement who is going to take over his job when he retires (Nawazuddin Siddiqui). He's overly eager and at first an annoyance to the widower, but a bond eventually grows between them as the widower opens up, thanks to his involvement with the housewife.

Aside from being beautifully shot, well written and featuring two great performances in our leads, THE LUNCHBOX also succeeds because it examines the way a love that grows between two people can change the two people for the better. By keeping the characters separate, we're more clearly able to see how their own lives improve for themselves – instead of changing themselves for another person, another person is encouraging them to change themselves for their own good.