‘The Lunchbox’ is a simple story with unanimous appeal, told with not so showy efficacy, and yet it is the most fascinating film to come out of Bombay in a very, very long time. In many ways, not least because it is an astonishing directorial debut - The Lunchbox is this generation’s ‘Masoom’. The Mumbai dabbawala is a miracle, a human cog with clockwork precision that operates, it seems, well outside Mumbai’s haphazard universe, and yet fuels the mercenaries shovelling coal into the city’s ever-open mar. Irrfan Khan plays Mr Fernandez with a superb placidity, a clock-obeying government employee who treasures silence. Khan clearly relishes the amount of internalisation the role allows him, and savours the quiet, thoughtful, melancholy beats of the film, unhurried but with his timing immaculate. Enchanting him is Nimrat Kaur whom we haven’t met before, but now, I daresay, shall be besotted with as a nation. All in all, The Lunchbox is perfectly handled and beautifully acted; a quiet storm of banked emotions.