Pun Salad

A very nice little Indian movie; Netflix correctly predicted I'd like it. It's built on a romantic comedy premise, but the structure is mostly dramatic. Although there are some very funny bits. Got that? OK, let's proceed.

Saajan is a widower, old, lonely, a bureaucrat on the verge of retirement from his soul-deadening job processing insurance claims. Ila is a housewife with a young daughter and neglectful husband. One day she puts an extra effort into making hubby's lunch, an array of tasty courses, packed into a tiered tiffin.

Apparently this is a thing in India: a service (called a Dabbawala) delivers your lunch to your desk. But wires get crossed somehow: Saajan gets the tiffin meant for Ila's husband, and Ila's husband gets the tiffin from Saajan's provider. When lunch is over the service works in reverse, returning the tiffin to its origin.

The mixup persists over time, and Saajan and Ila start corresponding through notes placed in the tiffin. Perfunctory at first, but they soon start to exchanging personal details and confidences.

In addition, Saajan's impending retirement gets him a trainee, Shaikh. Shaikh is initially your worst racist stereotype of the unctious Indian. (But it's OK, because… well, I'm not sure why it's OK.) Saajan initially treats Shaikh with ill-concealed contempt. But there's more there than meets the eye, and their relationship develops interestingly as well.

Interesting: many of the actors shift between speaking Hindi and English within a scene. I guess this is also something Indians do? At least according to this WSJ blog post, that's the "conversational style of many urban Indians". As you might guess, the there's a controversy.