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).
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.
Val says Much as we want the film to be well received in the Guardian by John Patterson it certainly was not.
Although readers writing in disagreed, they seemed to love the book and the film.
Not a film for critics but for viewers.
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