100 Feet Full Movie English
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The Hundred-Foot Journey is a tough slog across acres of corn and oceans of syrup and has provoked the world’s movie critics into an orgy of awful culinary metaphors in their reviews: lacking piquancy, not quite al dente, undercooked, over-egged, expensive ingredients lose all their flavour in this kitchen, and so on. But just because the cliches are flying doesn’t make them wrong. “Life has its own flavour,” says young Indian wonder-chef Hassan Kadam (Manish Dayal), but the movie does not. It tastes like British cuisine in the years after rationing, ie like nothing (oh come on, allow me one food metaphor).
With Helen Mirren and Om Puri as heads of two competing restaurants (one French with one Michelin star, the other Indian run by an exiled family from Mumbai, and separated only by that titular distance) in a French village so annoyingly picturesque you know without even checking that this is a Lasse Hallström movie, things ought to be off to a good start. Mirren is… well, she’s Dame Hellz: fabulous and imperious, enough said. And Puri is such a captivating actor I’d pay to watch him sit on a bus bench and grouch about the weather. But The Hundred-Foot Journey has all the vices of the European international co-production: everybody is out of their element. It’s based on a novel by an expatriate American born in Portugal and raised in Switzerland, directed by a Swede, stars a quintessentially English (though half-Russian) actor as a Frenchwoman, and is all about an exiled Indian family in France. The odd part is that only the Indian family seems to feel any firm ground underfoot, possibly because it’s led by Puri, who as usual has the battle-scarred authority of a war-weary general.
100 Feet Full Movie English
International Euro-tosh like this, when it’s not about the scenery or pleasing the tourist board, is all about the fake accents, one of my lifelong cinematic bugbears. Case in point: Mirren is condemned to using a French accent that’s as cumbersome to her performance as a sumo fat-suit. But, as the few exchanges she has with her French employees demonstrate, Mirren actually speaks beautiful, mellifluous, unaccented French that would stand her in pretty good stead for a spot of Racine or Corneille at La Comédie-Française. Puri’s heavy accent, by contrast, in that beautiful craggy growl, is all his own, the loveliest ingredient in his work, and in this film.
Lasse Hallström wearily revisits the food-porn territory he worked over before in Chocolat, with similarly vapid results. The Hundred-Foot Journey doesn’t ascend into food movie Valhalla alongside Tampopo, Babette’s Feast or Julie & Julia; it just lies there in the gutter with The Book Thief and all the other Euro-syrup that tries so nakedly to please that it just ends up annoying everyone.
