You could well imagine that Richard C Morais’s debut novel, The Hundred-Foot Journey, was written to be made into a post 2000 Lasse Hallström film. It is a warm, occasionally sentimental, situation-driven, feel-good, family film that is careful not to offend, pushes no boundaries and is formulaic to a fault. If you have enjoyed The Shipping News, Hachi: A Dog’s Tale, Dear John, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, and Safe Haven, you will find a lot to enjoy in The Hundred-Foot Journey.
Financed by the insurance payment on his restaurant burnt in a riot, Indian restaurateur Papa (Om Puri) takes his children abroad to forget the death of his beloved wife, killed in the fire. When they break down in the South of France (Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val for Francophiles), they decide to remain and open their restaurant in the picturesque provincial town. Papa unwittingly sparks a food war when he sets up Maison Mumbai right opposite a Michelin-starred, traditional French restaurant, La Saule Pleureur.
Only a hundred feet separate the restaurants, but their owners are on different planets. La Saule Pleureur is owned by pillar of the community and upholder of the status quo, Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), also conveniently single. Madame sets out to destroy the competition, but ends up embracing it.
Madame Mallory and Papa are not the only rivals in the kitchen who are destined to become more than friends. Papa’s talented, faultless and handsome perfect son Hassan (Manish Dayal) impresses Marguerite (Charlotte le Bon), a pretty sous-chef in La Saule Pleurer who is tired of being overlooked for the top job. Because they are young, they automatically see through the cultural barriers set up by their elders, one of the film’s occasional clichés.
The story is given an ‘edge’ through its dabbling in racism, as indeed, at the start, it’s difficult to tell if Madame Mallory is just a narrow-minded food snob or an outright racist. But this is one of those stories where racism cannot be tolerated for long. The graffiti on the wall of Maison Mumbai is the nasty handiwork of a handsome chef at La Saule Pleurer. He is quickly singled out and sacked by Madame who humbly goes out in the rain to paint over the graffiti. End of racism in the town.
If you want to drool over French food, the movie to beat remains Julie and Julia or Barbette’s Feast, but this film is beautiful to look at. We also spend a lot of time in the kitchen, although there are not enough close-ups on mouth-watering finished dishes to create an appetite.
If you can overlook the rapidity of Madame Mallory’s transformation, it is more difficult to overlook the fact that she is not French. Mirren’s accent on the one or two French words she uses is excellent, but why is she conversing with her French staff in English? Manish Dayal might be from South Carolina, but his parents are from India. There are several terrific French actresses of a certain age (Fanny Ardant springs to mind) who would have been more appropriate in a film about cultural divides.
Mirren and Om Puri are two veteran actors incapable of giving bad performances, but imagining them in a romantic relationship is a few hundred feet too much.
What is puzzling about this The Hundred-Foot Journey is that it was adapted for the screen by Stephen Knight, who wrote the gritty Dirty Pretty Things, the violent Eastern Promises and Hummingbird and the superb, experimental Locke. True Knight is no stranger to racial melting pot films, but his are hardly the type to be produced by Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, as was The Hundred-Foot Journey.
Morais’s second novel is similar in concept to the Hundred-Foot Journey and features another fish-out-of-water element. Buddhaland Brooklyn features a repressed Buddhist priest who moves from his mountain retreat to an Italian neighbourhood in Brooklyn. In either case, the ‘hundred-foot journey’ is a metaphor for the spiritual growth that transforms us all when we get down from our mountain monasteries or high horses and recognise the perfect omelette.
Joyce Glasser – MT film reviewer
