mistress of spices
a re-review

To say that Mistress of Spices is a big, big disappointment would be putting it mildly. The film, a mix of exotic India, magic realism and a Mills and Boons type of romance, is just terrible. Having opened to awful ‘spiceless’ reviews in the UK, the movie has bombed badly at the box-office there and it is easy to see why. The Gurinder Chadha – Paul Mayeda Berges partnership better get their act together now as post Bend it Like Beckham (2002), their films are going steadily downhill. Mistress of Spices is undoubtedly their nadir.

After collaborating with wife Chadha on the screenplays of Bend it Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice (2004), Mistress of Spices marks Berges’ sadly inauspicious directorial debut. The film, based on a best seller by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, looks at Tilo (Aishwarya Rai) – who has set up a Spice Bazaar in San Francisco which has something for all of its customers. Tilo is blessed with a gift of being able to look into her customer’s life so she knows what spices would help her customers. (Everybody has a spice, she says) But there is a price to be paid for being a Mistress of Spices. She must never think about her own personal desires, she must never physically touch anyone else, and she's never allowed to leave her shop. (A reviewer in UK asked who generated these rules. The Taliban?). Architect Doug (Dylan McDermott) bangs his bike outside her store and Tilo finds herself falling for him and has to deal with the conflict of her personal desires with her duty as a Mistress of Spices…

There are little or no redeeming features in this painfully slow moving film, not one memorable scene or moment. The film is full of exotic India, mystic land clichés and stereotypical NRI characters. The screenplay is totally mish-mashed and unimaginative. The use of the voice over technique to convey Tilo’s inner thoughts and her dialogues with her spices just doesn’t work. Admittedly it might have been difficult to find an alternate method to treat this part of the story cinematically to show the bond between Tilo and her spices, but to make things worse, these voice over bits are so badly written and are so literal that the director ends up underlining what you are already seeing without adding any new insight whatsoever. It ends up looking as the easiest and laziest way to get what the character is feeling.

Even sequences which could have had an impact like Doug’s American-Indian connection or Tilo’s first ride through the city with Doug, her first real look at the outside world end up as flat, unimaginative and listless.

Coming to the acting, there is nothing very positive to be said about the performances where the kindest word is for Ayesha Dharkar’s little cameo. Aishwarya tries gamely but is utterly defeated by the inane script. To be fair to her, she is certainly less stilted here than her disastrous turn in Bride and Prejudice but again, that’s not really saying much. As mentioned, her dialogues with her ‘spices’ are tiresome and laughable to say the least. And when her transformation does come for her one great night of passion, she looks totally devoid of it and the less said about the tacky lovemaking scene the better. Dylan McDermott, so good in The Practice, seems out of depth here playing an unkempt, hunky architect out to rescue our heroine. That there is no chemistry between the two leads doesn’t help the film either. Nitin Ganatra, an extremely fine actor otherwise, seems curiously flat in the role of the Kashmiri cab driver and Anupam Kher merely seems to be going through the motions.

On the technical side, the only positives really are the Production Design and Santosh Sivan’s efficient Cinematography. The editing is sloppy, often with glaring continuity lapses and awkward cutting points, the music so-so. Considering that the film speaks of a conflict between a woman’s personal desires v/s traditionalism, why use a song like Aap ki Nazron as a background motif for Tilo’s romance with Doug when she does actually stop out of the ‘threshold’. True, this would make no difference to the Western Audience and for all you know might be acknowledged as a nice romantic piece but its association here in Hindi Cinema is that of the servitude traditional Indian woman so glad that a man has finally found her ‘worthy of his affections’.

All in all, the film is strictly avoidable fare.