The Mistress Of Spices

Director: Paul Mayeda Berges

Cast: AishwaryaRai, Dylan Mcdermott, Anupam Kher, Padma Lakshmi, Zohra Sehgal, Nitin Ganatra, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Ayesha Dharker

4.5/10

Do you know the difference between clove (lavang) and cardamom (elaichi)? Is fenugreek (methi) all Greek to you? Then holi basil! (tulsi ? arrey, the plant not our famous bahu!) You need a taste of The Mistress Of Spices. But don’t let the title fool you. It’s not a Garam-Masala, Mirch-Masala movie about a hot--naughty femme fatale who can spice up your male fantasy. It’s a different kind of masala film. And all you get is haughty beauty Aishwarya with aloof charm giving lesson in cataloging of not-so-exotic-for-us-Indian spices, enlightening us about their etymology and medicinal properties. Aphrodisiacs, brain-coolers?oh, did you know that jhaal laal mirch could actually burn your tongue?

For all its spicy talk, the film has no pungent twists. And the story is as bland and insipid as some unpalatable-for-most-of-us dish. Which director Paul Mayeda Berges dishes out as a mystical tale about a woman who can heal people and alleviate their lives with her magic masala mixes (spice-girl power?). So everything from our common cumin-water (jal-jeera) to normal nimbu-paani (lemonade) suddenly acquires hidden meaning and heightened sensual significance.

Tilo (named after til ? sesame seed to you and me, we’re told emphatically) a young Indian woman runs a spice shop in California. She has a special gift. She can read troubled minds and gives ready remedies she concocts using an array of colorful herbs and spices. Red chillies, green coriander, yellow turmeric, orange saffron, white sesame and black peppercorn. Her customers swear by her potions which cure everything from common colds to heartbreaks; marital rifts to generation gaps. But her extraordinary power is conditional. She will lose it if she ever gives in to her own desires. But what happens when cool dude Doug enters her store one warm breezy evening and sweeps her off her feet? As rows of red-hot chillies blow off shelves and Tilo’s senses burn igniting carnal passion! Sounds like Mills & Boon scenario? Absolutely. The kind that uses banal exotica to spice up juvenile love stories.

Visual translation of Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni’s book’s seductive written language sensuous imagery becomes too literal in the film. Like Tilo’s delicate hands caressing rough-edged roots or gingerly rubbing red chillies.

Also, Aishwarya tries hard to do the whole mysterious spice-woman thing, but seems more an antithesis, as she awkwardly feels out fennel, kept in trays wooden as her expression. Set against forced sensuality of glamorously cross-lit gleaming garlic that make Santosh Sivan’s cinematography look like glossy cook-book photography.

Well, you can’t blame Ash really. Can you imagine getting excited about hara dhania or even kaala jeera? That too while mouthing embarrassingly corny one-liners peppering the film. “Talk to me spices”. “Don’t turn away chillies”. “Don’t punish him poppy-seeds”?! And it’s to her credit that she delivers them with a perfectly straight face! Of course, in fashionably colloquial Hing-lish. You know ‘hing’, na? Arre yaar, asafetida! You know, ‘the antidote to love’?

Mandira Mitra