The Hundred Foot Journey

As a fan of both viewing and devouring wonderful food, 2014 has provided two attempts to satiate my desires with Jon Favreau’s Chef a few months ago, and now The Hundred Foot Journey.  Wondrous times, these are.  After first glance of the trailer for The Hundred Foot Journey it became a most anticipated film to watch, one which promised the glory of cooking passion as well as interesting character stories.


The tale is about a family from India, close knit and bonded around a heritage of cooking, who lose their restaurant and suffer family loss which prompts them to bring their flavour to Europe.  Settling in a picturesque town in France, they open a new venture directly across the street from a Michelin Star winning restaurant owned by Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren).  Mallory is the definition of staunch refinement, a purest in all that is classic about classical dining, and she sees the new-comers as tacky and the opposite of everything her restaurant stands for.

The film primarily revolves around Hassan (Manish Dayal), who learned the passion of cooking from his deceased mother, and who struggles with his own ambitions for greater recognition.  This is more of an assumption that I am making based off of how the story unfolds, because we do not really get a tactile understanding of this portion of his character throughout the film.  There is an insertion of expository items to inform us, but never the actual experience of feeling it.  It is this issue that is mirrored in many other aspects of the film, as dramatic elements unfold before our eyes, but not completely resonating in the heart.

Throughout this movie, which does excel with charming and heartwarming snippets, both circumstances of tension and drama never quite feel as though they have been allowed to arrive organically.  Because of this, there is a disjointed nature to the rhythm of the film as the tone shifts left and right without the benefit of properly integrated transitions.  This is most likely the reason why I was convinced when the credits rolled that the film had been two and a half hours, only to have IMDB blow my mind, insisting to me that it was a mere two hours.  Oddly enough, I believe that if the film was twenty minutes longer, focusing on allowing the dramatic elements to breath deeper it would have actually felt shorter than it was.

This is not to say that it was any kind of horrific film.  The cast involved holds a level of talent that elevated a great number of the scenes and was able to nail the charm when needed.  The father of the family (Om Puri) showed a pleasant relationship with Madame Mallory, one that seemed due to the talent of both Puri and Mirren.  As well, Dayal worked well with his female counterpart Marguerite (Charlotte Le Bon).  So many of the greatest scenes in the film were quiet moments between these two, and, unfortunately, they were only fleeting within the larger scope of the movie.

Food, which is the binding power of the story, becomes a lost image as the story rolls on.  During the introductory phase we are treated to wonderful visuals of ingredients and preparation, as well as gaining insight on an almost spiritual relationship between Hassan and the dishes he prepares.  It was such a strong connection that really established who Hassan was, and it was unfortunate that director Lasse Hallstrom did not revisit it throughout the film.  Instead, Hassan is no longer built as what we are told he was; a passionate chef with a deep understanding of flavours.  As with the dramatic elements of the movie, we are told that it exists even though we cease to experience it and understand it.

Rating - 2 out of 4 stars