Starring: Manish Dayal, Helen Mirren, Om Puri
A family from Mumbai open an Indian restaurant in the French countryside, to the chagrin of a traditional restauranteur played by Helen Mirren. This film very much has director Lasse Hallström stamped upon it with an eerily similar premise to Chocolat, The Hundred-Foot Journey is a beautiful and sometimes sumptuous journey, but one with ultimately little in terms of direction or objective.
The Hundred-Foot Journey is a purely escapist and romanticised film. It caters less towards concerns for great film-making or great storytelling and pushes more towards glamourising its main subjects, namely France, India and the food of those two cultures. France is the rural countryside where everyone looks stylish and buys food at the local market. Paris makes an appearance but very late on, the pastoral image of France being easily dominant. The India is a raga music and quaint but efficient ways. The film trades in stereotypes, but ones that are positive and harmless whilst the food is lingeringly surveyed to the point where the term "food porn" is more than justified.
The film has problems, mainly that whilst Helen Mirren's not set up to be a character to be disliked by the audience, her attitude in the early going (arguably tantamount to racism) makes our sympathies for her a tough sell. In credit to Helen Mirren she only just manages to pull this off. The big problem though is that it's a film far too in love with its own aesthetic. It spends so much time luxuriating in exotic locales and foods that it neglects to really lay down what the story's point is. As the film went on, a slow realisation that I had no idea what the end point was, leaving the film to trail off in a slightly frayed, slightly messy fashion. Still, this is a film built largely on the fantasy and it does manage to deliver that.
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