The Hundred Foot Journey

The Hundred Foot Journey, plays out against a physically short distance, yet the distance that keeps the people involved apart, is vast.

The movie tells the story of a meeting between two cooking cultures:  Indian and French. Both are proud of their cooking traditions.

An Indian family, displaced some time before to England by political violence in their home country, seeks out a new life across the channel in Europe.  A chance car breakdown takes them to an idyllic French town; where they find the food ingredients with the flavours they are seeking.

Their arrival sparks a competition between cooking cultures and rival restaurants.  Four characters are at the heart of the story.  A young man, Hasan Kadam (Manish Dayal), brings new cooking genius to his work and to the French town.  He struggles with choices that will determine his future; while seeking to prove his culinary genius.  Papa (Om Puri), patriarch of the Indian family, seeks to overcome forces of exclusion, to settle in this new place and to succeed against an entrenched and hostile business rival. Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), the matron of a one star michelin restaurant, must defend her tradition and livelihood against these new arrivals, and Marguerite (Charlotte Le Bon) a sous chef in Madame Mallory’s restaurant, who initially welcomes the Indian family, finds herself in competition with Hasan, whose culinary genius she cannot match.

To cross the distance that separates them, the four must set aside their individuals interests and cross barriers of community, culture, tradition and intolerance.

The story is about the distance between human beings driven by “foreignness”: and the choices that we make that may bring us together or drive us apart.  The choices that each character make will determine the outcome.

The movie, directed by Lasse Hallstrom and is produced by Steven Speilberg, Oprah Winfrey and Juliet Blake.

It is beautiful story telling. The movie is based on the novel of same name written by Richard. C. Morais