The Hundred-Foot Journey *** (2014, Helen Mirren, Om Puri, Manish Dayal, Charlotte Le Bon) – Movie Review

Director Lasse Hallström’s 2014 culture clash foodie movie may be a bit slack, bland and complacent but it is still quite diverting and pretty enjoyable. Its main attraction is that it is starring national treasure Helen Mirren as Madame Mallory, the owner of an acclaimed traditional Michelin-starred southern French haute cuisine establishment, who is pulled out of her complacency when a Mumbai family breaks down on the roadside and then opens an Indian restaurant directly across the road.

With a wobbly ‘Allo, ‘Allo!-style phony French accent, Helen Mirren is about as French as, say The Queen, and her performance both vocally and acting-wise relaxes too often into her most famous role. Odd that, really. Nevertheless, though it is never going to be anyone’s favourite Mirren part, she is good enough value.

Much better is Om Puri, in a gift of a role as Papa Kadam, the commendably thrifty, feisty and resourceful patriarch of the Mumbai clan. He has got the film’s main role and fully deserves it. He twinkles. He’s fun. His sparring scenes with Mirren finally spark the movie to the one you hoped it would be. Shamefully, Om Puri doesn’t get his face on the poster or his name above the title on the movie.

A lot of the movie focuses not on the two admired veterans, but on the younger generation – Manish Dayal as Papa’s kitchen prodigy son Hassan, whose career starts going places – Paris! – when he gets the idea of French-Indian fusion cuisine. Dayal is good and so is Charlotte Le Bon as his unusually tough and independently minded love interest, Marguerite, who helps the family at the roadside and turns out to be working for Madame Mallory as a sous-chef, of course. The scenes where Hassan and Marguerite quarrel and fall out are the second best in the movie.

The estimable Steven Knight, who wrote the screenplays for the much tougher, more rigorous Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Eastern Promises (2007) and Locke (2013) is having a tiny bit of an off day adapting Richard C Morais’s book. There is nothing much wrong with the story or script. It is just that they are so middlebrow, cosy, warm-hearted and predictable that it hurts. I’m usually all for crowd-pleasing movies, but this one, much like Lasse Hallström’s 2000 similar movie Chocolat, presses its good luck far too hard.

It is a movie with messages, and you should leave messages to Western Union. The good-natured attempt to deal with race and politics is so well-meaning that it is painful. Can you really imagine a posh old French lady cleaning a painted racist slogan off the Mumbai family’s wall in the rain?

The film’s ending, where everyone’s entrenched views are changed for the best forever, is just so much wish-fulfilment. Mirren and Puri’s inevitable chaste love affair is really hard to take. The movie has no undercurrent of harsh reality, or even the real reality, other than the French racist chef and his explosive and sloganeering French nationalist actions, maybe.

Of course, it’s only a movie, Ingrid. And, as such, it’s an amusing bon bon. It is a tasty pudding confection, but where’s the main course, where’s the meat?

Superb, much-loved character actor Om Puri died of a heart attack on 5 January 2017,  aged 66. He notched up more than 300 acting appearance credits, most notably also Gandhi (1982), My Son, the Fanatic (1997) and East Is East (1999).

© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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