The Lunchbox (2014)

Now here’s a pure wake-up shot to my spoiled American self: A romantic comedy/drama from India that never sinks to Hollywood love clichés (love, sunset, no problems) and shows me lives and customs I never knew before. In Mumbai, there’s a whole industry of delivery men who collect lunch boxes from homes and bike the cargoes of food to the city’s vast web of office buildings, from wife’s kitchen to husband’s desk. We see that trade at the opening of “The Lunchbox,” which hinges on the joke that one woman’s (Nimrat Kaur) cooking efforts mistakenly land on the desk of a widower (Irrfan Khan) who longs for homemade food, for connection. Her actual husband? He’s too busy to notice her talent and likely philandering. Wife and widower bond through handwritten notes left in the food tins, each searching for emotion, and what better instigator than food? Writer/director Ritesh Batra never pushes expected romantic tropes, and layers her film with a stark realism of a city tripping over itself to quickly grow capitalist, but where being orphaned as a child carries social stigma into adulthood. The ending is perfection. A-