Chocolat, Partie Deux

It is a Lasse Hallstrom film about strangers who arrive in a small French village and set up shop selling soul-captivating food with exotic spices. They meet with resistance from the town’s most powerful resident. There is a forbidden romance as a subplot, and in the end, an important lesson is learned. No, it is not Chocolat, Hallstrom’s 2000 film with Juliette Binoche and Judi Dench. It is, rather, The Hundred-Foot Journey, which, although beautifully shot and acted, is essentially a remake of that earlier film with a few twists.

I suppose if you are going to rehash something, it is wise to rehash something good – and Chocolat is a classic. This time around, the strangers aren’t a morally suspect mother and daughter, but an expatriate family from India, driven from their homeland over some unexplained religious or political oppression.  Their food isn’t chocolate with magical Aztec spices, it is Indian cuisine with spices handed down from one generation to the next in a metal lockbox. Instead of Judi Dench as the aging matriarch, it is Helen Mirren. The essential familial bond is not mother-daughter, but father-son, and the romance isn’t between Binoche and Johnny Depp, but between American-born Manish Dayal and Charlotte Le Bon, who bears a striking resemblance to a young Winona Ryder.  And the lesson learned is not the value of the via positiva over religious moralism, but rather the value of cooperation over competition, and the celebration of difference.

The film is sensuously filmed, and the food images make one long for smell-o-vision, or better yet, taste-arama. Mirren is wonderful, as always, as an obstinate restaurateuse, and the other actors -- especially veteran Indian actor Om Puri (Charlie Wilson’s War, City of Joy) as Mirren’s equally obstinate foil -- are excellent.

However, the film never escapes its derivative elements, and the narrative arc is predictable. The third act is underdeveloped, and the resolution is weak. Despite these shortcomings, The Hundred-Foot Journey is an enjoyable if undemanding summer repast, that like all good meals, will leave you filled, but wanting more.  3.0 stars out of 4.0.