The Lunchbox (2013)
Directed by Ritesh Batra
A mistaken delivery in Mumbai's famously efficient lunchbox delivery system (Mumbai's Dabbawallahs) connects a young housewife to a stranger in the dusk of his life. They build a fantasy world together through notes in the lunchbox. Gradually, this fantasy threatens to overwhelm their reality.
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What critics compared The Lunchbox to
In movies, the epistolary story has taken many forms from an exchange of finely wrought letters in “84 Charing Cross Road” to the online correspondence between Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in “You’ve Got Mail,” where neither realizes the other is a despised business rival.
Where a Hollywood revamp like You’ve Got Mail facilely updated director Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 classic by substituting e-mail for mash notes, The Lunchbox makes a point of keeping the communiqués analog – an old-fashioned gesture in a local culture still caught between high-tech modernity and tactile traditionalism.
A clever setup that harkens back to “You’ve Got Mail” and “The Shop Around the Corner” doesn’t quite pay off in India’s warm-hearted comedy-drama “The Lunchbox.”
It is the Indian equivalent of Eat Drink Man Woman with a little You’ve Got Mail thrown in for good measure.
As a matter fact, were it not for the setting, the language and the mouth-watering shots of local cuisine, you might very well mistake it for Nora Ephron's You've Got Mail.
Writer-director Ritesh Batra makes his feature debut with The Lunchbox , an impressive romantic drama in the vein of Ernst Lubitsch ’s The Shop Around the Corner (or You’ve Got Mail , for modern audiences).
The setup is reminiscent of “Sleepless in Seattle,” and this film works like a sitar riff on Nora Ephron’s themes of the vicissitudes of human emotions and love.