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Red Hot Chili Opressors
By bukkhead | July 7, 2007
FILM REVIEW: ‘THE MISTRESS OF SPICES’
Written by Gurinder Chadha and Paul Mayeda Berges
Directed by Paul Mayeda Berges
Rated PG-13
92mins.
1 star
Tilo (Aishwarya Rai) was born with some kind of second sight, and here parents were murdered for it so she could be used by bandits to find treasure. But she escaped, to wash up on a secret island where an old woman runs a kind of nunnery for young girls who will become spice mistresses. When Tilo comes of age, she gets to walk across hot coals, and then go to a city of the old woman’s choosing, to sell spices and drift about languidly in her shop. And what great city is this? London, Paris, New York? No, it seems to be San Jose, and why not; Silicon Valley, after all, has an enormous Indian population (I mean, they must, right? There’s a tech industry there).
And of course there are rules. No using the spices for yourself, Tilo, no leaving the shop. Never touch another person’s skin. Sick of the misogyny yet? Wait, it gets better. Because when an old woman hands out rules about Aishwarya’s skin, you just know that rules is going to be broken. You see, the spices talk to Tilo, and none more then the long red chilies whenever Doug (Dylan McDermott) is around. And here the misogyny becomes even more abusive, since the chilies tell her Doug is hot stuff, even though they punish her when she indulges in a bit of eye-dancing.
Of course, they don’t punish her directly, but make her feel guilty by punishing her customers. Jagjit, beat up at school because he wears a turban (and all white people hate turbans, you see) suddenly makes friends (thanks to the spices) and becomes a wanna-be gang banger. Haroun, who’s spices help him forget his own parents murders, quits his bad job, and becomes a taxi driver, and gets hit in the head because he is a taxi driver. And poor grandpa Dada. His granddaughter falls in love with a Chicano! Those spices are mean bastards!
A bad story is bad enough, but then there’s the acting. I know these people can do better than this, though it would help if there wasn’t so much obvious dope smoking on the set. Aishwarya can’t seem to get her eyes past half-mast, and every time Dylan smiles, I expect him to start drooling as if in the beginnings of stage two sleep. And the rest of it is no better—perhaps the director heard that you can soften a shot by wrapping the lens in gauze, and wrapped his head in it instead. Hey, at least the set designer got it right. Lots of browns, golds, yellows and reds, just to remind us this all so very Indian.
A movie about spices should be spicy. Sure, one can get a really hot scene out of actors just staring at each other. But not with these two. Sorry, but beauty is not enough to make something hot. You also need that little thing that makes spices spicy in the first place. It’s called chemistry.
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