"The Hundred-Foot Journey" starring Helen Mirren is playing at the Durham Library this Thursday, Jan. 15, at 1:30

Movie notes by Don Bourret

The Hundred-Foot Journey might best be described as a charming and beautifully photographed fairy tale for adults, a delightful Disney film that’s not actually produced by the Disney studio.

Having run a restaurant in Mumbai for several years, the Kadam family flees India to escape the violence of civil unrest. They eventually settle in a small town in southern France and decide to open a new restaurant, Maison Mumbai. Unfortunately their chosen location is directly across the road and 100 feet from an upscale French restaurant, Le Saule Pleureur (The Widow’s Tears), which has a one-star Michelin rating. The restaurant’s owner, Mme. Mallory (Helen Mirren) greatly resents the intrusion of what she regards as decidedly downscale foreign cooking into her territory, and she wages an all-out campaign to drive the interlopers away.

The Kadam’s second son Hassan, however, is an excellent chef who proceeds to study traditional French cooking. Eventually the Maison Mumbai’s blending of exotic Indian and French flavors and techniques becomes very popular in the region. With a few twists and turns, the rest of the tale is quite predictable. Hassan and a beautiful sous chef at Le Salle Pleureur fall in love. He has a sojourn in Paris (exquisitely filmed) where he becomes a celebrity chef. He returns to Maison Mumbai. Enough said.

At one level the film pays homage to fusion cooking, in this case the blending of French and Indian tastes, where the result is superior to its individual parts. At another level, having begun with an extreme collision of cultures, the film illustrates how the merging of these diverse cultures has a beneficial result for all. The movie was produced by Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey, who had chosen the book on which it is based as a “favorite summer read.” She praised it for showing human beings coming to understand people in other cultures as just human beings who are more alike than different.

All the characters are very likeable, which makes its predictability easy to take. My one small objection is the casting of Helen Mirren as Mme. Mallory. I yield to no one in my admiration for her and her talent, but my wife and I had a hard time getting past seeing the revered British actress playing a French woman. She does a fine job, and obviously director Lasse Hallstrom (the marvelous Chocolat) chose her for her star power. But a French actress such as Chocolat’s Juliette Binoche might have been a better fit. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

A word of caution: don’t see this film on an empty stomach. Its beautifully photographed food is likely to leave you famished, and you may have an irresistible urge to run home and make an exotic omelette.