The Hundred-Foot Journey

Lasse Hallström’s The Hundred-Foot Journey looks great, is filled with pleasant characters, showcases some terrific-looking food and offers a nice — if hardly original — little message. It is, in fact, almost everything you probably expect. And it does what you expect with great skill and élan. That is both its brilliance and its curse. It’s the comfort food of the art house — making it seem a little common for the art crowd and a little too high-toned for the rest of the world. The truth is it should play pretty well in either realm, and from local reports, it seems to have done pretty well. (On a per-theater basis, it outdid Into the Storm, which is comforting in its own way.) I guessed it was going over pretty well in Asheville when there were 50 or 60 people at the 11:10 a.m. show at The Carolina on Friday.

The film may be lacking in massive critical respect, but audiences seem to like it. The combination of Helen Mirren, food and the gentle whimsy of Lasse Hallström in something like his Chocolat (2001) mode is pretty potent. With a surprisingly light screenplay by Steven Knight (of Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises fame), based on an apparently popular novel (the poster claims it’s “beloved”) by Richard C. Morais, it hits all the right notes without seeming altogether too precious. (Perhaps this is because Knight finds something of the Chiwetel Ejiofor-Audrey Tautou romance from Dirty Pretty Things in the young couple here.) It tells the story of the Kadam family, who have fled their native India after their restaurant was burned down during an incomprehensible political protest and the mother killed. After spending a year in England (where the vegetables have no soul), the family heads for France, wandering around the countryside while Papa (Om Puri) looks for the perfect place for a new restaurant.

The location is virtually chosen for him when their van breaks down just outside a picture postcard village. Better still, there’s an empty restaurant for sale — one that just happens to be right across the street from snobbish Madame Mallory’s upscale classic French restaurant. It is not difficult to guess where this is headed, or even how it will ultimately work out. Much less easy to predict — except maybe for the final outcome — is the path of the film’s young romantic leads, Hassan (Manish Dayal) and Madame Mallory’s sous-chef Marguerite (Charlotte Le Bon). Hassan — who has a natural genius for cooking — wants to go beyond his native Indian cuisine and become a chef at Madame Mallory’s restaurant, complicating their relationship by also making them rival chefs.

This isn’t any kind of a great movie, but it’s a film of easy charm and unforced natural elegance. Both are easily achieved with Helen Mirren as the star and Lasse Hallström directing. Mirren is particularly good here — occasionally looking for all the world like she did 40 years ago. But there are other factors. The screenplay — apart from a detour that feels like an unnecessary sop to the convention of the penultimate gloomy reel in all romantic comedies — is solid. Plus, it affords the level of conflict and the sense of something truly at stake that was completely missing from the inexplicably popular food-themed film from earlier this summer, Chef.  And the performances of the rest of the cast could scarcely be better, especially those of Om Puri, Manish Dayal and Charlotte Le Bon. A gentle, genial, pleasing time at the movies. Rated PG for thematic elements, some violence, language and brief sensuality.