Dad's Lunch Box

(HK release: 14 June 2018)

I often wait to read about a film until after I watch it, which allows me to form my own opinion without any undue influence. (On this occasion I was glad I hadn’t seen even the trailer for the film, which does it no favors.) When I entered the movie theater, all I knew about Dad’s Lunch Box was the title. As the opening credits rolled, however, I wasn’t particularly shocked to discover the titular lunch box was actually a bento, the uniquely Japanese take on a packed lunch. (It’s not that other places in the world don’t have similar concepts; they just don’t take it to the same heights of artistic cute.) Bento are without question culture eaten as a meal, so why not make a film with lunch boxes as the central motif?

Bento aside, the story is a simple one, but director Masakazu Fukatsu tells it with a deft hand, never straying into the overly sentimental. The film is billed as a comedy, but while it does indeed have many chuckle-worthy moments, its humor consists of much lighter strokes than, say, the My Wonderful Family films, also Japanese, in which the numerous laughs are based on exaggerated characterizations of recognizable types. In contrast, the characters who populate Dad’s Lunch Box feel like real people in a situation anyone might experience.

This impression might well be because the film is based on a real-life post from a Japanese girl’s Twitter feed. In a tweet, she shared that her father prepared a special lunch box for her final day of high school. With it was a handwritten note and a picture of the very first bento he made for her three years before, a brown and white mess that is a sharp contrast to the beautifully prepared, colorful lunch of that last day. This scene is beautifully rendered in the film, but is by no means the whole story.

(Mild spoilers for the first part of the film follow.)

The film opens on the end of a conversation between a man and a woman in a café. As the woman leaves, she urges the man to take good care of Midori and to feed her appropriately. We surmise these are Midori’s parents. The father assures the mother he can do it. Alone, he repeats to himself that he really can do it, but a hint of doubt in his voice leaves little doubt about what is to come.

We watch as the father really does struggle with his first bento, witness the daughter’s double take when she sees the lunch box her father has left on the table with a note declaring his intention to make her lunch every day, and laugh in anticipation as the daughter announces to her friends (with obvious trepidation) that her father, who has never really cooked before, has made her lunch. Midori’s two friends are delightful, offering staunch support and attempting to put a positive spin on events as Midori bravely eats every bite of those first few truly awful looking lunches.

The initial, lighthearted jabs at male ineptitude in the kitchen are never mean spirited, however, and the father’s cooking skills do eventually improve, despite some less than helpful initial advice from a male officemate. When another co-worker (female, of course) finally points him in the right direction, it hits just the right note — she is never condescending as she offers a bit of practical advice in the style of “teach a man to fish.” But while these initial father-out-of-his-depth scenes are fun to watch, they are ultimately just the setup for a much more meaningful story. The daily lunch boxes become a metaphor for the relationship between father and daughter, gradually demonstrating the ways in which we communicate with loved ones through the meals we prepare and consume.

While I have no idea how closely art imitates life in the film, knowing that it was based on real people did make me feel better about one troublesome aspect of the story: we never learn why the mother left. If this is a story about a real family, though, then clearly her absence is their private business. It has no real bearing on the story as it is told, anyway. Less easy for me to push aside, however, was the thought that this film probably wouldn’t have been made if the tweet had been about a mother’s lunch boxes. It’s true everywhere, I think, that when a skill is expected the meaningfulness of its execution is often overlooked. With that theme in mind, perhaps I will re-watch Babette’s Feast.

(This film has already been released in Japan and Taiwan. No information about a US release.)