The Tyranny Of Release Dates, Part II: 'The Lunchbox'
The romantic comedy-drama is not dead; it's just being platformed.
I saw The Lunchbox, the first feature from director Ritesh Batra, at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of last year. Starring Irrfan Khan and Nimrat Kaur, it takes as its jumping-off point the dabbawalas of Mumbai, guys on bikes who run a lunchbox-delivery system that brings hot, delicious lunches to people working in offices. (Spoiler alert: you will envy this system by film's end.)
In many families, the dabbawalas deliver lunches made at home by wives to husbands who are at work, and the story revolves around a rare dabbawala mistake in which young wife Ila (Kaur) makes a delicious lunch for her unappreciative husband and it winds up accidentally going to Saajan (Khan), a single man in middle age. They begin to exchange letters.
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