"The Hundred-Foot Journey" effectively tells a decent story for its first half or so, before narrowing its focus and telling a far less compelling story far less capably.
The first half of the film isn't "great" by any means, but it gets the job done. One gets the sense that the marketers knew it was the best the film had to offer, as it is almost exclusively the subject of the film's trailer. An Indian family happens upon a small French village and its patriarch (Om Puri) finds a building for sale that he decides to turn into an Indian restaurant. Helen Mirren (icy at first, but guaranteed to thaw by the time the credits roll) owns the high-class restaurant across the street, and she's none too happy about the new competition. What follows is a predictable, yet entertaining game of one-upmanship as each attempts to hinder the other's ability to do business. Slowly, however, they begin to admire each other and a rapprochement appears likely. This part of the film doesn't offer the most nuanced of cultural commentary, but it's passable and Mirren and Puri turn in good performances.
At this point, however, the film suddenly decides to focus almost solely on Hassan (one of Puri's character's children) and his personal ambitions. He had already been a major player in the film's first half, but the decision to focus so heavily on him in the second was a mistake, as the character was not interesting or likeable enough to carry the narrative (he needn't have been both--one would have sufficed). Watching him go to work at Mirren's restaurant, then achieve a level of fame and go off to Paris lacked the occasional charm present in the first half. Even worse, the angle of the two competing restaurants is dropped cold turkey. I'm not even sure that the Indian restaurant was kept open, the references to it were so sparse once the film elected to follow Hassan. It felt like an entirely different movie, and one that I would have rather not been watching. Of course, at the very end everything comes together again, but in a way that feels too clean and unearned.
I know this film is based on a book, so I assume its strange narrative choices were faithful to the source material. I can't speak as to whether those choices would work in a novel, but in a film they were unwelcome, pulling focus from where it belonged.
C
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