BEFORE: Helen Mirren carries over from "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms" - nothing against this film just yet, but it's really here because it links my two Christmas movies this year. I've got about 10 more Christmas-movies on my list right now, I know that seems like a drop in the bucket when you consider just how many holiday-themed romances get released on Lifetime and the Hallmark Channel each season, but I don't pay any attention to those, I try not to mix my holiday movies with my romance movies. That being said, tomorrow's film is such a mixture, and that's how I'm choosing to wrap up Movie Year 14. Hey, I'm just happy when I can end on any kind of Christmas movie, as the choices right now are sort of made for me by my choice of format. Form is definitely following function - and which Christmas movie(s) I watch is determined by the choices I made throughout the year. It's a process.
THE PLOT: The Kadam family leaves India for France, where they open a restaurant directly across the road from Madame Mallory's Michelin-starred eatery.
AFTER: It's kind of funny, we just had Indian food a couple nights ago - we remembered that there used to be an Indian restaurant 2 doors down from this diner in Queens that we went to regularly for at least a decade, before the diner closed down during the pandemic. Since then we've only got about three regular places to eat when we dine out, and that means we can get sick of them pretty quickly. But we have to be careful these days, just because a place we used to go to appears to be still in business, according to Yelp, it still might be gone. I don't understand why Yelp doesn't do a better job of updating its NYC database, or taking a minute to check in with the thousands of restaurants in the country to see if they're still in business - you used to be able to report to Yelp that a restaurant had closed, I guess maybe they disabled that feature? Were there too many false reports from rival restaurants?
I understand why so many restaurants closed during lockdown, but what I can't understand is why so many of them, at least in NYC, have not been replaced. The pandemic is over, people are going out again, the economy is supposedly better - or is it? But with all of the major eateries I used to go to that closed down in the last 2 1/2 years, I can't think of one that got replaced by a new restaurant in the same space. Somebody owns every building, and for every restaurant that closed, that's a landlord that's not getting any rent for that space. Does that make any sense? Who would rather keep a space unoccupied and NOT generating income when they could put a new business in there? Are there just not any people with the money to open new restaurants, or invest in them? Sure, times are tough, I get it, but if I owned a building with a restaurant space I would try very hard to DO something with it, so it at least generated some income. It seems like it's maybe a great time to start a restaurant, with so much space available, but what do I know? It's not like I have the money or knowledge to open a restaurant myself, so I guess we all have to get by with fewer places to eat until things really improve, I just don't know when that will be.
Anyway, we ate at the new Indian restaurant that replaced the old Indian restaurant we went to twice in the before-times. See, it IS possible to put a new restaurant where an old one used to be. The old owners probably leapt at the chance to sell the restaurant, and now the new owners are probably sitting around, looking at balance sheets, wondering how they're going to cover next month's rent. The place wasn't deserted on a Sunday night, but it wasn't exactly packed, either. Now it's the time of year when you'd expect people to get together with family and go out to restaurants and celebrate together, except we're not doing that, we cancelled any Christmas trip and plan to just eat at home. It's just as well, with this big storm coming in, it's going to be too cold to go anywhere, holiday travel's going to be the worst this year, so perhaps we made a smart move. And I think now I know why nobody's going out to eat, it's just such a hassle, when you can push a few buttons on your phone and have the food brought to you. Or, you know, you can always cook at home if that's your thing. I usually grab take-out meals on the nights I work at the theater, and that's usually two or three nights a week. They're maybe starting to recognize me over at the Popeye's and the Taco Bell.
For us, the Indian food begins and ends with chicken tikka masala, plus naan and maybe I'll get some samosas too, if I'm really hungry. If I should get tired of that dish, then I'll get shrimp biryani, but that can easily get too spicy for me. What more is there? I'm sure there must be countless varieties of Indian food, but once you've found the best dish on the menu, there's no need to vary from that flight plan. Wikipedia is telling me there are really 38 regional cuisines across India, but who has that kind of time? Obviously there's curry, which I think is the most popular Indian dish anywhere, but I don't mess with it because it could easily be too spicy for me. And sure, I know there are kebabs and chutneys and various types of flatbread, but I really just want to stick to my two dishes, and I'm OK with remaining ignorant about the rest. Maybe I'm missing out, maybe there's an Indian dish out there that would really knock my socks off, but this way I'll never find out about it, so there's no FOMO. As for those 38 styles of Indian cuisine, I'm just going to pretend it's like BBQ, essentially all the same stuff only each region puts a slightly different spin on it.
Oh, yeah, the movie. It really starts out as a depiction of class struggle, because the Kadam family patriarch decides to open a restaurant in the town near where their van broke down, and it's across the street from an upscale French restaurant. Prior to that, the family tried making it in London, only they found that they hated the cliimate and the vegetables weren't fresh enough, it's probably a fair cop, as the Brits say. So they leave England and head to Europe, but I don't think they really understood that the U.K. is actually part of Europe - of course they mean mainland Europe, but it helps to be precise, I always say. Anyway, their van breaks down somewhere in the Pyrenees, near the town of St. Antonin, and the woman who helps get them to town feeds them some of the local produce, which they enjoy. Well, at least they did their research before settling on a spot.
The family opens an Indian restaurant, what else, and then it's a battle for market ingredients and the hearts of the local populace with Le Saule Pleurer (French for "weeping willow") across the street. Madame Mallory is the rival proprietor, and Marguerite, the woman who drove the Kadams into town, is a sous chef there. Hassan Kadam is the family's chef, but he also has a desire to study classical French cooking, and he's got an eye for Marguerite, so you can probably figure out where the storyline's going to go from here. Part of this seems like one of those dreadful Hallmark Channel romance plots, with two people from different cultures and different classes falling in love as they cook side-by-side. Hassan makes an omelet for Madame Mallory and it's so impressive, she offers him a job in her restaurant. (Conveniently, she'd JUST fired a chef for taking things a bit too far when trying to drive the Hassans out of town.)
Naturally, Papa Kadam is against his son going across the street to work in the rival restaurant, but it is what's best for his career, so he can get some form of classical training. So Mr. Kadam relents, and it turns out to be best for everyone - Hassan learns to cook the French way, Madame Mallory gets a chance to increase her number of Michelin stars, and Marguerite gets a rival, friend and love interest all wrapped in one. And a new fusion of French cooking with a bit of Indian spices is formed, which turns out to be great for the diners - umm, except the ones who liked eating at the Maison Mumbai, because Hassan's brother just isn't as great of a cook as he was. Try as it might, this film can't escape painting the Indian food as lower class and the French food as upper class, but shouldn't that be a matter of perception? I mean, there could be an Indian restaurant with Michelin stars, it's not impossible.
But things being what they are, the French restaurant wins acclaim and notoriety with the help of Hassan, and then he simply HAS to go to Paris. Once word gets out about the better rating, naturally the job offers flow in, and Hassan accepts a job at a fancy restaurant that specializes in that molecular gastronomy stuff. But, NITPICK POINT here, why is this a fait accompli, as the French say? Hassan doesn't HAVE to go to Paris, sure, it's fine that he chooses to go to Paris, but it's not an absolute MUST. Surely there must be some chefs who are happy where they are, serving their local community, and not every chef has to travel to a big city to find out if they can handle that. Like anything else, I guess you have to go where the jobs are - but he HAD a job at Le Saule Pleurer, he could have kept it, especially if he liked working side-by-side with Marguerite. Right?
In his absence, Papa Kadam begins spending more time with Madame Mallory, but the film just can't quite bring itself to call this an actual romance. OK, they dance together, but she still calls herself his "not-girlfriend". OK, so, then what are they? Just besties? Frenemies? Dating adults who hate labels? It's unclear. Then it takes Hassan's brother traveling to Paris to cook for him to remind him how good Indian food was back home - did Hassan forget how to cook Indian food? No, I get it, eating food from home can bring back memories, and this makes Hassan homesick for St. Antonin (which is weird, you'd think it would make him homesick for Mumbai...) and so he travels back to give Le Saule Pleurer another go, and maybe to finally get with Marguerite. I mean, that's great, Hassan, you do you, but we all saw this turn of events coming a mile away.
And hey, the director also carries over from yesterday's film, both this and "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms" were directed by Lasse Hallström - I suppose that's bound to happen randomly once in a while. He's Swedish, but I guess it takes a Swedish guy to direct a film set in France about a relocated Indian family? Well, it's beside the point because I've got just ONE film left to watch in 2022, and then another type of work begins for me - writing my year-end wrap-up and then trying to figure out how I'm going to start Movie Year 15. More on that next time, perhaps.
Also starring Om Puri (last seen in "Gandhi"), Manish Dayal (last seen in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"), Charlotte Le Bon (last seen in "Berlin, I Love You"), Amit Shah (last seen in "Johnny English Strikes Again"), Farzana Dua Elahe (last seen in "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time"), Dillon Mitra, Aria Pandya, Michel Blanc, Clément Sibony (last seen in "The Walk"), Vincent Elbaz, Juhi Chawla, Alban Aumard, Shuna Lemoine, Antoine Blanquefort, Rohan Chand (last seen in "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle"), Masood Akhtar, Cédric Weber (last seen in "The Legend of Tarzan"), Saachi Parekh, Shaunak Parekh.
RATING: 6 out of 10 wild mushrooms
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