The best thing in the movie is the music of AR Rahman. The second best thing in the movie is Om Puri as the hilarious Mr Kadam, the buffoon-with-brains. The third best thing in the movie is Helen Mirren as the elegant Madame Mallory, the she-devil-with-feelings. And lastly there is Charlotte Le Bon as Marguerite, just because there is nothing more romantic than a French girl riding a bicycle in a French village wearing a French skirt (though Le Bon is actually Canadian and almost thirty, but hey, who cares – it’s a movie).
I think the first time I ever saw a Frenchwoman riding a bicycle was Bernadette Lafont in François Truffaut’s “Les Mistons.” Now that is an iconic image.
“The Hundred-Foot Journey” is a movie where the Indians speak with Indian accents and the French speak with French accents and if you go to Paris you can see the Eiffel Tower from everywhere. Of course no Frenchman will speak English in France, I mean, never – after all French used to be the lingua franca! The film is more of a fairy tale with cartoon-realism where everything is predictable, you know exactly how it’s going to end, but that’s the fun of this genre.
First and foremost this is a romantic comedy, but that does not adequately describe the movie, since it’s like one of those sub-sub-sub brands. To be more precise, it is a romantic comedy set in a small village in France where an elite one-star French restaurant striving for its second Michelin star faces serious trouble when a new Indian restaurant opens just a Hundred-Foot across the street. We soon have conflicts between the owners, Mr Kadam and Madame Mallory, and friendship between the cooks, Hassan and Marguerite. And yes, food becomes the cross-cultural bridge of love. So it is really a food movie.
The way the movie hypes food, chefs and restaurants (like the search for The One in “The Matrix”) looks quite silly, because frankly I just could not relate to it. Why not? Perhaps because in our country most food contains either poisonous preservatives or pesticides and there is an epidemic of IBD from eating in restaurants. How can I say chefs are magicians? Just watch Aamir Khan’s brilliant show “Satyamev Jayate” episode on food (Season 1, Episode 8: Poison on our Plate?). My favourite scene in the movie is where Hassan makes an omelet as if he is conducting an opera.
The movie should be watched at least for AR Rahman’s beautiful music. I just love these tracks: “Afreen”, “My Mind Is a Stranger Without You”, “You Complete Me”, “India Calling”. Did you know AR Rahman has more money than the top three Hollywood composers – John Williams, Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman – combined?
Producers Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey hired Lasse Hallström to direct the film based on Richard C Morais’s first novel. Hallström, who made “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” is an able director but one wonders if Mira Nair would have been a more apt choice for the film.
I would say “The Hundred-Foot Journey” was quite enjoyable. What I felt about the movie is best described by Johnny Carson: “Folks thanks for the wonderful time, I am going to remember this as long as it takes me to reach my car.” Come on, we cannot expect every movie to be a masterpiece, but that should never stop us from enjoying a movie. A person told me he never rates a movie 10/10 because no movie can be that good, so he rates his all-time favourite movie “Dark Knight” 8/10. Well, I am more generous by nature, I will rate “The Hundred-Foot Journey” 8/10.