I once knew a young lady. In the interests of this review for The Hundred-Foot Journey – and online propriety – let’s call her “Marguerite.” Marguerite was a young, lusty girl, full of sass and life and verve. She wasn’t quite like anyone I’d ever met before, and made my gawky, goofy high school self feel all kinds of feelings. Marguerite and I were together but for a short time, but that time always serves as a kind of guiding point for my experiences with passion, especially of the younger, sillier, and more reckless sort.

I tell this brief and somewhat uninteresting anecdote because in The Hundred-Foot Journey, releasing this week from Touchstone Pictures circa 1996, food is meant to rile up this reckless kind of passion. Our protagonist Hassan (the impossibly handsome Manish Dayal) is continuously driven to unlocking food’s mysteries. Picking ingredients. Mixing ingredients. Cooking meats and sauces. Devouring the creation. Every facet of the “ritual” of food – sumptuously lit in all of its various textures – is detailed, meant to ignite fires deep inside moviegoers’ minds. It doesn’t.

 That’s not to say The Hundred-Foot Journey isn’t entertaining. Directed by Lasse Hallström from a Steven Knight screenplay based on the book by Richard C. Morais, The Hundred-Foot Journey is pleasingly light, with moments of humor, and comfortably free of any conflict. Yes, Hassan’s grumpily lovable dad (Om Puri) might be dragging his Indian family across the French countryside in the hopes of finding a true home. And yes, his dreams of opening an eatery might conflict with a prickly Michelin-starred, classically French restaurateur (reliably kickass Helen Mirren), but we all know where this is going almost from the very beginning. Hallström’s even made this movie before. It was called Chocolat.

Where The Hundred-Foot Journey falters most is the premise suggested by its title. Puri’s Bollywood-happy restaurant opens a mere hundred feet from Mirren’s forteresse de cuisine, and the journey characters make – in a thudding, oft-repeated visual gag – is meant to represent their attempts to bridge personal, cultural, and generational divides. Instead of exploring any real version of these divides, The Hundred-Foot Journey expects half-baked (Puns!) platitudes about life, death, food, and memories to do the work. Sun-dappled mixing bowls and peppy montages stand in for anything meaningful.

But really, that’s OK. If a movie can be forgiven for anything, it’s focusing on ephemera, as movies themselves are often little more than ephemera. It might say some uncomfortable things about modern culture that we make movies indulging the sensual enjoyment of food, but that’s another article for a different type of website. The Hundred-Foot Journey is perfectly harmless, meant for an easygoing crowd (perhaps of a certain age), with little interest – oddly – in fueling fires like those Marguerite ignited in me all those years ago. Bon appétit.

The Hundred-Foot Journey, an Amblin Entertainment, DreamWorks Pictures, Harpo Films, Image Nation, Participant Media, Reliance Entertainment, Touchstone Pictures production distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, is 122 minutes long and rated PG.

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