While Chef pleasantly kicked off the summer another culinary dramedy will be arriving during the season with DreamWorks’ The Hundred-Foot Journey. Based on Richard C. Morais‘ hit novel, the story follows an Indian family who moves to France and opens a restaurant across the street from a Michelin-starred French restaurant with direction by Lasse Hallström (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Chocolat)
The first trailer and poster have now dropped today for the film led by Helen Mirren and it certainly looks like something that would come from producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg. With a sugar-coated story and feel-good voice-over it seems tailor-made for the demographic, but we’d actually go for this over the other offering that weekend, one that involves turtles. Starring Helen Mirren, Charlotte Le Bon, Rohan Chand, Manish Dayal, and Om Puri with a script by Steven Knight (seemingly far removed from his Eastern Promises and Locke), check out the trailer and poster below.
In “The Hundred-Foot Journey,” Hassan Kadam (Manish Dayal) is a culinary ingénue with the gastronomic equivalent of perfect pitch. Displaced from their native India, the Kadam family, led by Papa (Om Puri), settles in the quaint village of Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val in the south of France. Filled with charm, it is both picturesque and elegant – the ideal place to settle down and open an Indian restaurant, the Maison Mumbai. That is, until the chilly chef proprietress of Le Saule Pleureur, a Michelin starred, classical French restaurant run by Madame Mallory (Academy Award®-winner Helen Mirren), gets wind of it. Her icy protests against the new Indian restaurant a hundred feet from her own escalate to all out war between the two establishments – until Hassan’s passion for French haute cuisine and for Mme. Mallory’s enchanting sous chef, Marguerite (Charlotte Le Bon), combine with his mysteriously delicious talent to weave magic between their two cultures and imbue Saint-Antonin with the flavors of life that even Mme. Mallory cannot ignore. At first Mme. Mallory’s culinary rival, she eventually recognizes Hassan’s gift as a chef and takes him under her wing.
The Hundred-Foot Journey opens on August 8th, 2014.