‘I’ ON CULTURE
The recipe for The Hundred-Foot Journey is just a bit too sweet to be a great film, but, oh, does it make a nice dessert. This delicious concoction, directed by Lasse Hallström, breaks no new ground and its end point is pretty obvious from the start. Its plot could have (and has) been the center of a Hallmark TV romance movie; however, the whole production is done so well that you simply lean back and enjoy it.
The main focus is on the battle between Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), the owner of a one-star Michelin restaurant in a small town in southern France, Le Saule Pleureur (The Weeping Willow), and the patriarch of a wandering Indian family from Mumbai, Papa Kadam (Om Puri), who settles in the town and opens an Indian restaurant across the street from her. She does all she can to stop the new place, and he fights back. He grumbles and is amusing, and she is pure glacier. To add spice, his son Hassan (Manish Dayal) is a brilliant cook who immediately falls for Mallory’s favorite cook, Marguerite (Charlotte Le Bon).
A nasty act of racism persuades Mallory to stop fighting and eventually to hire Hassan so he can learn the major secrets of European cordon bleu cookery. He gets her a second Michelin star (something she’s strived for more than 30 years) and moves on to Paris. As expected, he finds himself lonely and alienated and, if you can’t figure out what happens in the end, you have not been going to movies for the past century.
As I wrote earlier, nothing in the film’s plot comes as a surprise. But the story simmers so nicely that you will hardly notice. The nasty racist act, done by an actor with a small part, brings forward the issue of racism and ethnocentrism. But Madame Mallory’s coming across that hundred-foot distance, the single street, to clean off the racist sentiment, makes a strong statement in favor of human decency. And her horror at seeing the young cook’s hands, burned while putting out the fire, rings very true.
There is a marvelous scene at this point where Hassan auditions for her, making an omelet, although using her hands to do the work, which is almost worth the ticket price alone. Scenes like this seem to flow right out from some Oprah Winfrey advice, and, no surprise, she is one of the producers. But it has the ring of truth, and that always wins out.
The cast is superb. Mirren brilliantly plays strong women who start out rigid and then turn softer, and she does it again. Om Puri, a top Bollywood actor, matches her well. He manages to be wonderfully funny and touching within a single crotchety character. The two are a wonderful match. From their opening salvoes in a war to their acceptance of each other and finally to perhaps more, the two of them carry the film. They are the main course of the meal, with many interesting and different touches. Whenever they are together, things get interesting.
The two young people are as attractive as one would expect. Dayal, the character whose growth is at the center of the story, handles it well. There are twists and turns, and he navigates all of them nicely. He manages to seem so out of place in Paris that despite success, you know he does not belong. And Le Bon is adorable. She manages to be beautiful very much in her own way. With huge eyes and a marvelous smile, she takes what could be a passive role and creates a woman who is very much her own person with real ambitions. Hassan, and I would guess the whole audience, finds her irresistible. The rest of the cast is excellent. Michel Blanc as the mayor who is nearly hassled to death by the two leads as they fight was really good in what could have been almost a throwaway role. And the French countryside is in its own way a character as well. The scenery is spectacular.
This is a real summer treat of a film. It is too sweet to be more than a dessert, but, then again, that is most people’s favorite part of a meal. No surprises, things work out well. It is a nice film.
