In “The Hundred-Foot Journey” we follow Hassan Kadam and his family moving from India, where he, as a boy learns the importance of Taste, to Europe to find a new place to live. In a scene where a seven year old Hassan, with his mother follow a fishmonger through a busy Mumbai market with the day’s catch of sea urchin, as a dozen women with cash in hand shout offers to the urchin peddler, he notices Hassan examining and then sampling the orange innards of the mollusk and the look on his face shows the understanding of why it is such a delicacy. Afterwards the fishmonger tells the women that he has sold his haul to the young man. An odd symbolic gesture, foreshadowing Hassan’s later rise to culinary stardom, as almost the next Ferran Adria.
The rest of the time in India has Hassan learning to cook from his mother, until a random act of violence due to an election going one way, rather than the other finds the Kadam family without a home and mourning the loss of Hassan’s mother. All of this, told through flashback as Hassan and his family are going through customs. An odd way of setting up the backstory, of an over-long film, that also seems to have suffered from there being too many chefs in the kitchen. I lost count of the producing company vanity cards at the beginning of the screening, after the 6th. What film production and restaurants certainly have in common is definitely dealing with ego.
“The Hundred-Foot Journey” is produced by Oprah Winfrey & Steven Spielberg, and seemed to fit both of their audiences quite well. While the movie was charming, and not without its laughs, for a movie about cooking, there wasn’t much food. There were probably 15 shots of food being served. And even with a few scenes that were cut into montages, the film seemed to sag.
While it was an entertaining movie it was like having a meal placed infront of you, with too much fat on the steak, the potatoes are overcooked and the garnish is a whole bushel of parsley instead of a sprig or two, but the wine pairing was perfect. An enjoyable meal, that doesn’t sit well after.
I give it a solid B. There were a ton of laughs and everyone in it worked well. I couldn’t help but be reminded of “Ratatouille.” Though if you’re a fan of any of Anthony Bourdain’s travel shows, and wondered why some of the best restaurants in the world are in small towns, “The 100 Foot Journey” captures that reasoning very well.
