Mistress Of Spices

Cast: Aishwarya Rai, Dylan McDermott, Nitin Ganatra, Anupam Kher, and Padma Lakshmi
Director: Paul Mayeda Berges

Rating: *

The Mistress of Spices is an astoundingly bad film — astounding because it had everything going for it. A best-selling book by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni as the source, Gurinder Chadha’s husband Paul Mayeda Berges as director, a decent budget and all the publicity that an Aishwarya Rai film manages to garner. Though it positioned itself as a ‘crossover’ film for Western audiences — hence the selection of a novel with ancient Indian mysticism as a theme — the film has not appealed to its target group — judging by the savage reviews in the British press, and cold reception at the box-office.

Aishwarya Rai plays Tilo, who belongs to a secret sect of women trained to use traditional spices to heal, and with special powers that enable them to understand people’s unspoken traumas. The condition is that a Mistress of Spices, must suppress her own desires, never touch anyone and never step out of the spice shop. So Tilo runs Spice Bazaar in San Francisco, and solves the problems of customers — some unusual (a black karate instructor wooing his girl with Indian cooking), mostly mundane (an old man is shocked when his granddaughter falls in love with a Chicano).

Then, for no reason one can see, she falls in love with brainless-looking hunk Doug (Dylan Mcdermott) and is in danger of losing her powers. Far from generating some chemistry between the lead pair, Berges can’t even explain why Tilo falls for this particular dude, who seems to have no distinguishing characteristics, except the overwhelming desire to confide in her, which everyone does, anyway. Tilo does break the rules eventually, but suffers no consequences, making one wonder what the stringent rules were for then!

Tilo carries on a monologue with the spices, which, after a point gets irritating. The lives of the immigrant community in San Francisco which was a focal point of the book, are of no consequence here, though Tilo is specially concerned about a Kashmiri cabbie and a Sikh boy harassed with racists slurs.

Aishwarya Rai, dressed in simple saris looks wan amidst the vibrant colours of the spices she is surrounded with, and her wide-eyed simpering does nothing to add any zing to Tilo. This one’s not a fiery love story, not a piece of magic realism (like Chocolate or Woman on Top), not a dramatic tale of immigrant woe... it does not work at any level. To use too obvious an analogy, this film is like a bland curry in which the cook forgot to add garam masala.