Charlotte Le Bon – Christian Sauvé

The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-06-292023-03-18 Movie Review

(On TV, June 2019) In keeping with the times, it’s been a great decade for food-themed movies from 2007–2016 (ish). Suddenly, from No Reservations to Chef and Burnt, we had at least a dozen movies about professional chefs, restaurants and everything else peeking behind the scenes of the foodie scene. With only five years’ worth of perspective, The Hundred-Foot Journey certainly fit in the subgenre. Here we travel to rural France, as a family of Indian immigrants settles in a small town to open their own restaurant … right in front of a Michelin-star haute-cuisine establishment. Definitely approaching food as a sensual, romantic endeavour (the slow motion starts as soon as someone picks up a utensil and a bowl), director Lasse Hallström blends a feel-good mix of cultural acceptance, character growth, power-of-food homilies and straight-up romance. Helen Mirren headlines the cast, but the film rests on Manish Dayal’s likable performance, with some assistance from Charlotte Le Bon as the love interest, and Om Puri as the patriarch. There aren’t really any surprises here—the ending is almost exactly what you can imagine. But it’s a fun trip, even though the film may be a touch too long and almost certainly a bit too ponderous for what it could have been in more impatient hands. There’s a specific audience for food movies, and The Hundred-Foot Journey will deliver what they expect.

Movie Review

Realive aka Proyecto Lázaro (2016)

ByChristian Sauvé 2018-12-082019-12-12 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, December 2018) Speaking as a long-time written science fiction fan, a really nice thing about the 2010s has been the expansion, globalization and democratization of filmed SF, as more filmmakers around the world are using a common understanding of the genre, cheap digital effects and accessible production means to create small-scale visions that go where Hollywood wouldn’t. With writer/director Mateo Gil’s Realive, this means a Spanish/Belgian production tackling universal ideas with a European slant, not necessarily settling for the same answers that what we’d see from other sources. The SF theme is familiar—a terminally ill man, choosing to be cryogenically preserved in the hope of a later cure. But of course, things aren’t so simple—being revived decades later leads to profound side effects, and there’s no guarantee that a man out of time would be able to cope with a future where he has to relearn everything. And that’s not mentioning the big question lurking behind it all: revival isn’t cheap, someone financed our protagonist’s return to life—and they expect a return on their investment. Going back and forth between a contemporary and a future timeline, Realive opposes the present and the future, as well as the choices the protagonist must make in leaving loved ones behind. The future, mostly taking place in a medical clinic, is cold and antiseptic: Yet revival is messy, complicated, prone to setbacks and uncomfortable choices. Our protagonist is not always of admirable fortitude, and the film does have an ironic surprise for him at the end. Tom Hughes is not bad in the lead, with Charlotte Le Bon providing some emotional support, and the eye-catching Oona Chaplin as the most vivid character in the film. While there isn’t much here that seasoned Science Fiction fans won’t have seen in other (usually written) forms, it’s good to see filmed SF rise to the level of maturity of prose SF and keep a stinger in reserve. While Realive is perhaps a bit too downbeat to please large audiences, it’s a mature kind of SF film, and one that should exist alongside happier, more superficial fare.