Hallström: The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014)

Given that Helen Mirren is about the only venerable British actress who doesn’t appear in the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel franchise, it was perhaps only a matter of time before she appeared in a film that was more or less targeting the same niche – in this case, an adaptation of Richard Morais' novel about an immigrant Indian family who set up a restaurant across the road from a Michelin-starred restaurant in a small, picturesque French village. Tensions immediately arise, and a great deal of comic subterfuge transpires, until the two parties realise that their shared love of food is greater than anything keeping them apart. Similarly, it’s only a matter of time before Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), the manager of the Michelin restaurant, realises that young Hassan (Manish Dayal) is prodigious enough to propel her into the two-star stratosphere she’s been aiming for ever since receiving her first star some thirty years before, and offers to bakroll his formal culinary education. As a result, most of the film takes place as a kind of experiment in French-Indian fusion – at first combatively, as the two restaurants deliberately buy up each others’ ingredients at the local market, only to be forced to find a way to incorporate them into their own menus, but then more generously, as Hassan, in particular, sets about reinventing the Cordon Bleu canon in the light of his own heritage. If that sounds somewhat predictable, that’s because it is, but part of what makes the film work is that the combative element never quite goes away – there is a continual, if affable, jostle for supremacy in the kitchen, just as it’s the tension and dynamism between Indian and French ingredients that defines the particular brand of French-Indian fusion that Hassan pioneers upon moving to Paris in the third act to become a celebrity chef in the vein of Ferran Adria. For all the cosiness, then, there is room for Hallstrom to cloak a whole lot of fixations in contemporary, competitive, combative food culture – reality cookoffs, charismatic chefs, sourcing fresh ingredients, molecular gastronomy – in the MOR magical realism that he does so well (along with Chocolat and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, it almost makes for something of a  loose trilogy), until it feels as if we're dealing with a quite contemporary food sensibility despite all the nostalgic period trappings – a sense of fine dining as mouth orgasm or direct brain stimulation that perhaps explains why every romantic or erotic encounter is so pointedly oral or olfactory, or why there’s such a libidinal fixation on feeding sauces and spices to the beloved. For these characters, the centre of the nervous system are the taste buds, and, as in Chocolat, the film poises us, time and again, at the seconds just before and after they’re stimulated, until even the safest and most respectably arthouse conversations brim with a pregnant mouthfeel that can only be satiated by eating or feeding someone something delicious as soon as humanly possible.