The Hundred-Foot Journey review: Puri, Mirren save the film from becoming a stale banquet

The Hundred-Foot Journey begins with a walk through a fictitious Mumbai market. Instead of a shopping list, what we get is an Exotic India checklist. There are bright colours, crowds, heaps of flowers, friendly banter, a lot of jostling and — wait for it — as basket of sea urchins. If you think spotting these in Mumbai is unlikely, then wait for what happens next. A gaggle of women start yelling as they fight with one another over who should get the sea urchins. In this melee is a young boy. He picks up a sea urchin, opens it and sniifs, breathing in its distinctive aroma. In the unlikely event that sea urchins showed up in your neighbourhood fish market in Mumbai, chances are that the real haggling would be between the fish seller and the buyers, rather than between buyers. If you had the temerity to go around fiddling with the produce and sniffing it, you’d probably get a severe talking to from the seller, especially if you’re a kid. [caption id=“attachment_1653977” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Courtesy: Facebook[/caption] In The Hundred-Foot Journey, however, the fish seller beams at the boy and sells the entire basket of sea urchins to him. A little later, the boy’s mother tells him, “The sea urchins taste of life…raw, beautiful life. … But to cook, you must kill. You make ghosts. You cook to make ghosts. Spirits that live on in every ingredient.” If your eyes haven’t rolled to the back of your head, here’s a little nugget for you. The boy’s name is Hassan Kadam. You’d be hard pressed to find a Muslim family with the Hindu surname Kadam in real life, but this is the India of Hollywood movies. Chalta hai, apparently. Usually, we expect Bollywood to be full of such complete and casual dismissal of logic and realism. In the past decade or so, however, Hollywood has shown that its more than able to beat Bollywood at its own game. So films like Enchanted take the musical format of Hindi blockbusters and use them to tell a sweet and silly story. Recently, 22 Jump Street showed us how stupid, comedic bromances like Humshakals should be done. Now director Lasse Hallstrom is here with The Hundred-Foot Journey, starring Helen Mirren and Om Puri. In all fairness, despite that ghastly beginning, The Hundred-Foot Journey is a very pleasant watch until interval strikes. The film is about two culinary cultures, Indian and French. Standing between them — sometimes literally — is a young Indian chef named Hassan Kadam (Manish Dayal). As a boy, he stole sea urchins. As a young man, he works with his father (Om Puri) in their homely Indian restaurant, in a tiny French village. Across the road from the Indian eatery is a fancy French fine dining restaurant, run by Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren). Madame Mallory is not amused by Maison Mumbai, the Kadams’ restaurant. The music is too loud, the Indians are too boisterous and Papa Kadam is not intimidated by her. Hassan, on the other hand, is fascinated by French food and in his spare time, he teaches himself the basics of classic French cuisine. Then one day, Madame Mallory tastes Hassan’s omelette, which may sound a little suspect but is entirely innocent. Amazed by his talent for mixing flavours, she offers him a job at her restaurant. Will India lose its most brilliant bawarchi to fancy French food? Can there be peace between the straitjacketed French restaurant owner and the boisterous Indians? So long as Hallstrom has the powers of food porn, and Puri and Mirren making mischievous magic with their acting, The Hundred-Foot Journey doesn’t trip itself up. It’s an absolute joy to see Puri play Papa, the grumpy, stingy and utterly delightful patriarch of the Kadam family. Mirren is as fantastic as one would expect the award-winning actress to be and the best part of The Hundred-Foot Journey is the war between Madame Mallory and Papa. She slyly trips up the Kadams by buying out all the ingredients they need. He bribes one of her porters to get her menu, and then returns the favour. She snoops around his backyard, he plays Hindi music at full volume. He also dresses up in wedding finery and literally drags people off the street and into his restaurant. Along with the gorgeous shots of French food being prepared, all this is fun enough to make you ignore details like The Curious Case of Disappearing Coriander in Hassan’s Omelette. From what we are shown, Hassan’s secret recipe for a fantabulous omelette includes a large bowl full of coriander leaves (and entirely too much paprika). The green against the yellow of the yolks looks spectacular when the mix is being prepared. And yet, the final omelette has no green bits in it. It’s about as mystifying as the trunk of spices that Hassan inherits from his dead mother. The spices in it last for years without losing flavour or freshness. Still, so long as the food looks pretty, who cares about these details? We don’t, until Mirren and Puri recede into the background, and the beautiful-looking food more or less disappears from the film. Instead, we get close-ups of Hassan’s face, as he goes around collecting Michelin stars the way we collected marbles as kids. There’s also a love story that sinks like inexpertly-made souffle. Hassan’s supposedly exciting new creations are mostly names of dishes or ingredients that are read out and Dayal is just not charismatic enough a screen presence to make us forget about everything that’s half-baked in the film. The point of The Hundred-Foot Journey is to give the viewer a tasting menu that covers everything from heartwarming home cooking to molecular gastronomy (which according to this film is just strange-looking, soulless food rather than the crazy, magical experience that the cuisine actually offers when it’s done expertly). However, without Mirren and Puri to keep things fresh, The Hundred-Foot Journey ends up feeling like a banquet made of leftovers that’s going on for entirely too long.