FRENCH and INDIAN WARS

Epic veggie fail, but Mirren is as tasty as ever

No surprises, but lots to savor in fun foodie film feast Hundred-Foot Journey

If you've seen the preview trailer for The Hundred-Foot Journey, you've seen the movie. If you've seen any foodie film in recent history in which cross-cultural food becomes a metaphor for spicing up life and/or romance—Chef, Chocolat, Babette's Feast, Like Water For Chocolate—you've seen this movie.

Basically, nothing happens here that's not telegraphed in the first fifteen minutes, or so, besides which every major plot twist and punchline has already been revealed in that trailer.

And yet, having said all that, The Hundred-Foot Journey has its easygoing charms. Thoroughly engaging performances are provided by a mixed cast of veterans and newcomers, led by the always sublime Helen Mirren and Indian national treasure Om Puri.

The location is irresistible, a sun-drenched corner of the South of France where an upstart family-run Indian eatery sets up shop across the street from a venerable French restaurant.

And there's plenty of good-looking food (of course), from haute cuisine to vivid massala-spiced Indian dishes to simple French country cooking, presented with enough relish to make it all go down smoothly.

Scripted by Steven Knight from the novel by Richard C. Morais, the film is directed by Lasse Hallstrom.

Fleeing political prising in India, the large and boisterous Kadam family is searching for a new place to put down roots when their decrepit vehicle breaks down in a charming French village. Widower Papa (Puri) buys a large stone farmhouse for the family's next culinary enterprise, with grown son, Hassan (Manish Dayal) in the kitchen.

Charlotte le Bon and Manish Dayal

The only catch? It's right across the road from the elegant one-star Michelin restaurant of Madame Mallory (Mirren). Papa insists the town is big enough for both classical French and traditional Indian food, but a cold war quickly escalates between the two establishments.

Meanwhile, Hassan sparks with Mme. Mallory's young sous chef, Marguerite (the lovely and spirited Charlotte Le Bon), who recognizes in him the soul of a fellow food artist. (Read more in this week's Good Times.)

Are we hungry yet?

BEWITCHERY

The hits just keep coming at the Aptos Cinema Weekend Classics series. This weekend (just in time for May Eve!) they're showing one of my favorite movies, ever, the bewitching Excalibur, John Boorman's voluptuously textured 1981 plunge into the King Arthur saga. This gorgeous take on the rise and fall of Camelot is not set in some recognizable historical period, whose details might be disputed by the Fact Nazis (costumes consist largely of polished silver, metallic lace, and gossamer); instead, it unspools within the misty depths of the collective human imagination, where dreams and myths are born. Boorman's source material was Thomas Malory, and every frame of film in infused with Celtic magic and mysticism.

A young, non-star cast breathes life and immediacy into these archetypal, yet human characters. The noble Arthur of Nigel Terry is a happy surprise after his mewling, petulant Prince John in The Lion In Winter a decade before. Cherie Lunghi makes a saucy Guinevere, and Nicholas Clay an earnest Lancelot. But delightful, eccentric Nicol Williamson steals the show as Merlin, along with the hypnotically sensual and diabolical Morgana le Fey of the young Helen Mirren.

(Helen Mirren and Nicol Williamson in Excalibur)

The film was shot in Ireland, and lots of young Irish actors new to the movies got early roles here. Keep an eye peeled for an embryonic Liam Neeson as Sir Gawain, and Gabriel Byrne as Uther Pendragon. (And btw, this film also features the most exalted use of Carl Orff's driving Carmina Burana chorale ever heard in the movies.)

But it's Boorman's breathtaking images—violent and sensual, sacred and profane—that keep us riveted. This is not a fairy tale for kids, (rated R and 140 minutes, for those of you keeping score at home), nor a conventional Hollywood costume epic. It's an intoxicating spectacle of mythic power and savage grace. This is one movie you really want to be overwhelmed by on a big screen, so don't miss it! Saturday and Sunday, 10:30 a.m., at Aptos Cinema.

So what's the deal about May Eve? In the old Celtic calendar, before our mass culture got so homogenized and disconnected from the land, and the seasons, the first of May was reckoned the beginning of summer. And the night before (Aril 30, May Eve) was the second most uncanny time of year—after the Eve of All Saint's Day, or All Hallows Eve, October 31— when the portals between this world and the magical Otherworld were momentarily in synch. (Sort of like that tricky moment at Kings Cross Station in the Harry Potter books when you can run right through the wall and find the train to Hogwarts.) At these eerie moments of the year, fairies, demons, and spirits were free to run amok in our world.

In pagan times, the festival was called Beltane, for sun god known by various names like Beli, Belenus or Balder, although some insist "Beltane" merely means "bright fire." In the dark of Beltane Eve, fires were lit on hilltops to herald the coming of summer and the return of the sun god. (Something we Santa Cruzans can appreciate after a ridiculously wet winter.) After the Christian Church came along to muscle the old gods out of the picture, fires were still lit on May Eve, but the Church put out the rumor they were meant to scare off pagan witches. In German-speaking Europe, May Eve is Walpurgisnacht, the night of witches' revels, celebrated by stout-hearted practitioners of wicca to this day. That's the thing about folk traditions: the folk tend to hang on to them, no matter who's temporarily running the show.

For centuries all over Britain, May First was celebrated by troops of young men and women frolicking out in the woods before dawn to "bring in the May"— whatever flowering shrubs or blossoms could be found, often leaving flowers on the doorsteps of friends and neighbors to celebrate the fertility of Maytime. Fertility was certainly on the mind of Puritan writer Philip Stubbes, who complained in 1583 that "of fortie, three score or a hundred maides going into the wood overnight," less than one third "returned home again undefiled." They don't call it the lusty month of May for nothing!

(Above: A detail from "A Visit at Moonlight" by E. T. Parris, ca. 1832.)

TEMPESTUOUS

A dream cast, a marvelously rugged locale in the Hawaiian Islands, one of the most durable and enticing works in all of Shakespeare's canon (with a sly, feminist twist), and the inimitable touch of visionary director Julie Taymor: what could possibly go wrong with The Tempest? The answer is, not much, in Taymor's long-awaited screen version of Shakespeare's most wistful, magical, and elegiac final play. True, some parts bump along, and the film as a whole offers less of the sheer visual rapture-per-frame than her masterful debut feature, Titus. But this is still vintage Taymor, necessary viewing for anyone following her remarkable career, and an insightful adaptation that in many ways strips down Shakespeare's tale to its essential humanity.

In Taymor's gender-bent revision, the mighty Helen Mirren stars as "Prospera." A wise ruler devoted to study and science, she's suffered the fate of so many studious women who are in the way of somebody else's plans: she's been accused of witchcraft and exiled with her daughter to a remote island by the usurper brother who now rules her kingdom. The uninhabited island is alive with magical forces, which the seething Prospera (the ultimate Woman Scorned) has imperiously enslaved. The airy sprite, Ariel (Ben Whishaw) is bound to do her bidding after she released him from a magical prison. The native-born "monster," Caliban (the great Djimon Hounsou, caked in variegated mud and rags) is her beast of burden.

12 years later, as a ship carrying many of her friends and enemies from court goes sailing by, Prospera uses sorcery to call up a fearsome storm, wrecks the ship, and conspires to land all the passengers ashore to taste her revenge. Much wandering about the island ensues, as the audience plays Name That Actor. Yes, that's Chris Cooper as the usurper brother, Antonio, and David Strathairn as the stoic, noble neighboring king, Alonso. Tom Conti emanates twinkly goodness as Alonzo's old counselor, Gonzalo, sympathetic to Prospera. For comedy relief, we have Alfred Molina as the drunken butler, Stephano, and Russell Brand as court jester Trinculo, the buffoons that poor Caliban mistakes for gods.

(Btw, I, for one, think Brand is perfectly cast as the jester, beribboned, in his tattered dandy's finery, with his working-class accent and pragmatic opportunism. Trinculo is not one of Shakespeare's wise, soulful clowns, like Feste or Lear's Fool, and Brand dives in with the antic brio of an innate funnyman who understands he has to be amusing or starve. Check out this video of Brand's hilarious 5-minute improv on his character's backstory to see how he gets into the spirit of the thing.)

Meanwhile, Prospera's now-grown daughter, Miranda (Felicity Jones, as a barefoot wild-child) falls in love with the first white man she's ever seen—Alonso's stalwart young son Ferdinand (Reeve Carney, of the band, Carney, and star of the upcoming Spider-Man Broadway musical). But the most profound relationship is between Prospera and Whishaw's wonderfully fey, yet heartfelt Ariel, who serves her with glee, yet risks her wrath daring to remind her of her promise to set him free. With a female Prospera, their usual master-servant, parent-child relationship takes on a complex new dynamic (especially as they bandy about the question of love). She may use him to her own ends, like Elizabeth I deploying one of her besotted courtiers, but its Ariel's poignant suit for justice that helps restore this wily female sorceress to her full humanity.

What disappoints about this film is that so much of the magic feels so earthbound. Titus was such a visual treat because of the way Taymor made her simple, yet dazzlingly poetic stagecraft work onscreen—the eerie, percussive dance of marching soldiers; fountain statues morphing into live figures in a bathhouse; yards of blood-red ribbon issuing from a tongueless mouth. But most of her magical effects here are CGI. You can feel Taymor's delight in being able to realize her wildest images onscreen, and, sure, it's a kick when Ariel tears across the screen in all directions, growing huge and tiny, racing rings around himself. But it just doesn't have the same "cool" factor, in terms of sheer ingenuity.

Still, the package is intriguing. The music by longtime Taymor collaborator Elliot Goldenthal combines electronics, soaring chorales, and peppery pagan-influenced rhythms. Sandy Powell's costumes range from the punk aesthetic of black leather and chains to the sort of found plumage and ruined finery one might scavenge on a deserted island. This Tempest is certainly roiling with ideas, and if it's not Taymor's most successful work, it nonetheless sweeps you along for the ride.