Too many chefs: Completely predictable, manipulative film but some good restaurant scenes

If it feels as if you've seen this movie before, you're right, you probably have, especially if you also saw Chef earlier this year or in fact if you've seen any movie about the restaurant biz or about an immigrant community faced with initial hostility but gradually winning love and friendship as the immigrants both learn the new culture and contribute their own special "flavor." This movie is The Hundred-Foot Journey, another feel-good film from Lasse Hallstrom that feels, well, too much like a film and very little like life (similar in mood to the likable but manipulative Marigold Hotel). After a clumsy beginning, we see that this film tells of a restaurant-owning family forced to leave native Mumbai after restaurant destroyed in a fire, wandering Europe and settling in rural France of all places when their van breaks down - and where they open an Indian restaurant across the street from (that's the 100-foot journey) a 1-star Michelin restaurant owned by a mean, automaton played by the ubiquitous Helen Mirren. Story line is mostly about the family patriarch - who of course builds a friendship and then a weirdly chaste romance with Mirren - and his son and protege, who over time falls in love with her sous chef, played by an adorable Charlotte La Bon. The story line is entirely predictable, much of the dialogue and many of the set pieces are so heavy-handed as to be laughable, every scene seems to be dripping with meaning and significance - and yet, the film does have its moments and its pleasures. First off, I enjoy watching just about any film that shows serious food preparation, though this doesn't come close to, say Eat Drink Man Woman, it's fun to watch a re-creation of a French country restaurant and the loving preparation of some Indian dishes as well. Second, I very much liked the scene in which Mirren (and later others) stand up against a right-wing anti-immigrant group in the town: though it's again heavy-handed this is a really important message for Americans (and Europeans) today and I'm glad Hallstrom didn't shy away from this topic. Also I have to say I like the look at the ultra-chic "3-star" Paris restaurant where the young chef tries to earn his chops (before he realizes, as every single viewer will predict, that his place is back in the village where he can create his own cuisine drawing on classic French technique and Indian spices - mais oui!) - the coldness and emptiness of the 3-star where the byword is "innovate" is really pretty funny and, pathetically, probably not too exaggerated (cauliflower ice cream!).