The Mistress of Spices

The spices look as luscious as the female star but the chillies act better than she does.

Herald rating: *

A foray into the very problematic genre of magical realism, this is an adaptation of a novel by Indian-born American writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni about a orphan girl who is introduced to the magical properties of spices by an old woman who seems to live on a beach.

Five minutes later, the girl, Tilo, played by Rai, a former Miss World and the big Bollywood star of Bride and Prejudice has grown up and runs a spice bazaar in San Francisco. Here she concocts mixtures that will satisfy the spiritual as well as the culinary needs of her clientele (fennel for perseverance; cinnamon for making friends).

The trouble is that the psycho-diagnostic powers with which she has been endowed, which include the ability to tell the future, require her - for reasons never explained - to never use them for her own ends; never leave her shop; and never touch the skin of another human being.

The last of these - well, all of them really - prove problematic when a spunky architect named Doug (The Practice's McDermott) crashes his Triumph on her doorstep. She patches him up with unguents and one thing leads to another.

But painfully slowly. There are such shades here of the equally silly Chocolat that you wonder why it wasn't called Chocolat Masala.

But the twist is that the exquisitely beautiful Tilo is as synonymous with hot sex as Julie Andrews was in The Sound of Music.

The camera virtually drools on her - some sequences are like Playboy shoots - but it's infuriatingly chaste and quite without dramatic logic.

We have no idea why a woman sworn for years to a sort of dispensary chastity would fall for this prat - or why he's hanging around her. The chemistry between them has all the sizzle of yoghurt.

The secondary characters are an ensemble so stereotyped they make your teeth ache. And the dialogue, leaden and laboured, is like bad Theatresports.

It's puzzling, considering that Gurinder Chadha, who made Bend it Like Beckham, co-wrote with her husband Berges.

The sumptuous cinematography makes the spices look almost as luscious as the female star - certainly the chillies act better than she does - but the most that can be said for the film is that it will put you in the mood for a curry.

Cast: Aishwarya Rai, Dylan McDermott
Director: Paul Mayeda Berges
Running time: 96 minutes
Rating: M, medium level violence
Screening: Rialto, Bridgeway, Village

Verdict: A feeble magical realist love story with a garbled narrative and dubious sexual and ethnic politics. Clumsy and laughably improbable.