(To be completed)

What sets a letter apart as a medium of communication? The implicit empathy that the two people share has all the magic.

What I loved about The Lunchbox

A great film or a great performance is when you rewatch a scene, and are still able to take something away, even resonating further each time you watch it. Nimrat Kaur’s silently creeping sense of helplessness in her everyday life, and the emerging sense of optimism in their lives based on this singular commmunication.

Favorite Scenes:

Dear Ila, Thanks for the lunch. The salt was a bit on the higher side.

The Characters

Ila – Nimrat Kaur

There is something heartbreaking about this character. The one feeling you get from the character is helplessness.

The best scene was when she was visiting her ailing father. Confronted with the need to support her parents, she needed to put up a brave front, that her husband and her can support the family, while her own relationship with her husband was suddenly so fragile.

Another heartbreaking scene was the conversation with husband. Ila’s attempts to receive some signs of intimacy from her husband were coolly deflected.

The upper-floor aunty provided a nice comic counterfoil to Ila. Tasked with caring for a semi-comatose husband, the cheerfulness in her was infectious. And yet, like her parents’ relationship, it revealed that a deteriorating marriage would only cause further pain with time.

Saajan Fernandes – Irrfan Khan

How would I place the attitude of Irrfan’s Saajan Fernandes. He is passively going through his role by the day. He’s worked as an insurance claims accountant for 35 years, and he’s gotten very good at it. And yet, of course, he is not passionate about it, at least not in the way us Gen Yers are supposed to be. He’s getting prepared for the next phase of life – retirement. It doesn’t seem like he’s looking forward to it. It’s just that he’s accepted and resigned to retirement, because, well, why not.

So the character is about accepting and resigning to fate. And then the lunch box happens. The film is not a love story. It is about two people sharing their thoughts about life, and finding they have a sympathetic ear. Letter writing has that assumed sharing of empathy – you have to believe that the other person is empathetic to your thoughts, that they understand the emotion, the thought, the anxiety therein.

So coming back to the line about the salt. When you first see that in the film, you immediately assume he’s complaining. But by the end of it, it almost feels like a compliment. He’s somebody who is very sparse in his appreciation of people.

Shaikh – Nawazuddin Siddiqui

For Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Shaikh is such a fantastic role – the brightness and foolish optimism of the character is so apart from his roles as dried-up anti-hero in Gangs of Wasseypur and Sacred Games.

The dynamic between Irrfan’s Saajan and Nawazuddin’s Shaikh is so sweet. Shaikh, an orphan without family who’s just returned from Saudi, is hungry to get some sense of belonging and turns to Saajan for affection. His incompetence as an accountant certainly does not get in the way of him being just as optimistic. Saajan, set in his ways, does not q uite know how to return the affections. As the correspondence with Ila brightens his days, Saajan becomes receptive to Shaikh’s cheerfulness.

What is also clear from him that much of his social behavior is learned. He’s learnt, probably the heard way, that to be considered socially acceptable you need to have an optimistic and positive temperament.