An old piece on 'The Hundred-Foot Journey'

Unedited ...

First, a section from Appadurai’s work ‘Gastro-politics in Hindu South Asia’

In contemporary South Asian society, even a casual visitor can only be impressed by importance of food in daily life and daily discourse. Foods are regarded as important media of contact between human beings; in a society that rests on the regulation of such contact, food is a focus of much taxonomic and moral thought. Cuisine is highly developed and highly differentiated, and even modest peasant diets have some variety. Feasting and fasting have powerful associations with generosity and asceticism. Food avoidances, for different persons in different contexts, are developed to a remarkably high degree and signal caste or sect affiliation, life-cycle stages, gender distinctions, and aspirations toward higher status. Finally, the linguistic usages surrounding food themselves encode some these distinctions. In such a highly particularistic society, this is no casual burden for any semiotic device. What accounts for the variety and intensity of communicative tasks performed by food in South Asia?

The Hundred-Foot Journey is a film about the Bombay-Muslim Kadam family, refugees to rural France via London (because “the vegetables have no soul” on the wrong side of the English channel). Papa Kadam and family are forced to seek asylum in Europe because a mob firebombs their humble restaurant over an irritatingly unexplained “election dispute”, maybe they discovered they voted Congress. This early chaos sets the scene for the less tumultuous degeneration of the family’s vague identity, as they (dis)integrate into the new and pleasurable life and styles of Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val, the town in which they fortuitously land once their car brakes fail. Maybe goat biryani, saris, and saag aloo is an identity in and of itself. Om Puri is the steadfast traditionalist, and Manish Dayal is the impertinent genius chef. Lasse Hallstrom, a Swedish director, seems immensely intent on making it very hard to suspend one’s disbelief by only casting actors who have little real-life resemblance to their characters. Maybe fittingly.

The film’s surface message is noble, family-oriented, and reasonably light-hearted - an Indian restaurant is being set-up within spitting distance of a single Michelin starred classical French one, in pursuit of their second. The widowed Madame Mallory and the widower Papa Kadam are initially at loggerheads but eventually put their differences aside due to the indisputable talent of Hassan Hajji. Hassan gets Mallory her second Michelin star and is packed off to Paris to make it as an even bigger success in the big city. Unclear what is to happen of Maison Mumbai, the restaurant the family worked so hard to set-up, reliant on the cooking of the prodigal son.

Hassan, meaning the handsome benefactor, and Hajji meaning one who has performed Hajj, wants to learn about French cooking and wants his father to stop being so difficult, so Indian. Stop bargaining like a cheap-bastard! Stop thinking anyone wants to eat your bloody curry instead of frog legs! (or boeuf bourguignon, and five types of sauce, and pigeon, and sometimes an omelette - the extent of French haute cuisine as far as the film is concerned).

Hallstrom, assisted by Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey, spin a story of the model minorities that eventually succumb to the wonderous laicite of the Midi-Pyrénées. Presumably a region full of Front National voters. The Kadam family, set the scene by initially asserting their offensive ethnic-flavour in this no-name Occitanic town, but realise that life becomes much easier once they start drinking and falling in love with local women, and learn how to cook with class. Hallstrom subconsciously asserts the second, lesser-known commonality between the Indian and French popular imagination (the first presumably being their love of good food) - the hatred of Muslims. No comment on the politics 2014 India is further necessary.

I think the film is supposed to be a heartwarming tale of how the love of food conquers any limits and something about East meeting West. Instead, it leaves a sour taste in my mouth as it uncritically postulates that the only way to successfully integrate into French society is to adopt their ways unquestioningly. A symbol of Hajji’s ultimate success is that he starts dressing like a French man, drinks a lot, and the father for some reason has become a champagne-popping charmer, who only an hour prior was dreaming of speaking to his dead wife, presumably killed by an angry Hindu-mob. The only good worth keeping, that the Kadam’s can introduce to la France Profonde, is apparently cardamom, turmeric, and coriander.

But perhaps within the imagined universe of Richard Morais and Hallstrom, one in which Indian fishmongers sell basketfuls of sea urchins to a fevered crowd full of market women, and one in which a middle-class Mumbai youth would crack one open raw and eat it with the dexterity of a uni-savouring omakase chaser, all of this makes sense. In this universe, a La Liste topping restaurant in one of the most sophisticated food cities in the world needs a red-blooded Indian to introduce tandoori masala and cauliflower ice cream to them.

To cook, you must kill, you cook to make ghosts - says Hajji’s mother early on. So Hassan kills his identity and makes a ghost of his past. Everyone is happy, vive la France.

“This film is not in love with food; it is commercially invested in the idea that food is something people think they love.”