I shall dwell for a moment on the previews that were shown before the movie started, because they did a great deal to set the tone and temper of the movie - for me, at least. The first was for The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which I rather liked, not least for the panoply of stars featuring in it, but which seemed to perpetuate the notion that Indians are an exotic people. It's probably a silly thing to quibble about, since I who have seen firsthand the cultures of both the West and the East am no doubt impervious to many things about India that people from the West are likely to find bizarre. Still, exotic is a word I find singularly odious. I would nevertheless like to watch this series from the start. The second preview was for a movie whose name I don't remember, in which three refugees from some country in Africa were stuck living with a woman in the US. I found the treatment of these three men by the other characters very condescending. Here I was thinking that the half-devil-half-child view of non-Western cultures was no longer cloven to. But these men were treated like children throughout, and burlesqued in a manner that I found distasteful. ("Your survival skills are incredible," said one of them to the woman hosting them, when he learnt that she lived alone and wasn't married.) Whatever the movie turns out to be like, the impression I got from the preview was that it was about White people patting themselves on the back for a good deed done rather than the tribulations of three people who have been transported from an impoverished village to a big city.
You can imagine my apprehension when The Hundred-Foot Journey started with a scene from a dhaba-type restaurant in India. I'm intimately familiar with Hollywood's idea of India. How they think soporific sitar music always plays in the background, and everyone's constantly chanting the Vedas. It's little wonder that people in the US are surprised when they hear an Indian speaking English. ("Oh, your English is so good!" "Yes, the British presence in India was longer than in America." "Oh.") That annoying saintly scientist from 2012 who addressed everyone as "friend" has never been spotted in India. It's doubtful whether he even exists. Life of Pi was nearly the same level of cringeworthiness. I thought at the outset that The Hundred-Foot Journey would be the same, but my fears turned out to be unfounded. The characters were all natural, in spite of their occasional lapse into Bollywood-esque drama. The protagonist seemed blissfully unaware of his gift as a chef (and by blissful I mean the saintlike obliviousness of the scientist from 2012), but I'm willing to let that slide. I couldn't help noticing that the traditional role of India the Motherland in movies in which precocious young people are shown being swept away by the transient attractions of Western culture before they run back home crying contrite tears was in this case filled by a French village. Quite a change, but the formula is the same. So much so that I'm willing to label this village a buffer India. Helen Mirren was excellent, of course, and Om Puri's humor was refreshing. Overall, it wasn't a bad movie.
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