Mistress of Spices: Book vs. Movie

Wednesday, 14 February 2007

By Sumiko E. I don’t recommend either; both the book and movie were a huge waste of time. The title is delish but everything from that point on is annoyingly exoticized. Spices, spare me. [Before I continue, consider these disclaimers: I think Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is a very talented teller of tales. I am suspicious of how much and why the story she created was changed, especially its movie version. As a fan of Bend It Like Beckham I admire Gurinder Chaddha’s work.] On page: The book appealed to me because it was written by a fellow desi immigrant, who is also a Bay Area woman, and it is set in the part of Oakland in which I work! I found her use of the English language particularly unusual and intriguing. The priority given to explaining the cultural, religious, and medical significance of each spice makes parts of the book read like informative poetry. At times, it felt like I was reading the thoughts of an aunty like any other, but then I noticed how often articles, plurals, and singulars were all used correctly. About half way into the story, just as soon as the reader gets used to the narrator’s chop suey thoughts and descriptions, it becomes clear that the magic is not in the story but simply in how the story is told. No kalo jire will join cardamom seeds in crashing to the floor and spelling out “Dude, Tilo, get over yourself!” On screen: What a sin. And that’s not a compliment. Love/sex sells – we all know it – but the movie was a complete disgrace to the book. To take a story of a woman’s struggle with her duties versus her desires, her pride versus her insecurities, and simplify it to an astonishingly bland love story wrapped in a sari, placed uncomfortably on a motorcycle wrongs any magic the original story conveyed. The casting of the main characters was a terrible mismatch. In the book, Tilo is described as an old woman. Like wrinkly old. Like Oprah without make up old. In the movie, Tilo is played by Aishwariya Rai, former Miss World and forthcoming doll-with-a-sword combatant. Appearances aside, neither Rai nor Dylon McDermot, who played Tilo’s temptation, did any justice to the characters they were supposed to portray. Throughout the book Tilo was a somewhat selfish and tenacious work-in-progress, and yet endearing because she never hid that reality from herself no matter how harsh it was to bear; Aishwariya’s portrayal of Tilo was difficult to empathize with because it lacked that very human quality of self-awareness. Dylon McDermot was cast as the man Tilo desires, a character named Raven in the book, and as such, described as having a dark and mysterious charisma. In the book, Raven is a well-off and unemployed party-boy-turned-somber-man, who usually cruises around in his oh-so-cool red convertible. Instead of sticking with the character’s book description, McDermot was made out to be an architect, with some stubble, a flashy motorcycle, and the name Doug. Not Raven as in the book, but Doug is nowhere in the book. Raven isn’t exactly gentle, but Doug…now that’s fierce. I, too, would be sweating bullets and cursing the chilies if a guy named Doug walked into my store. Yeah. A few other characters also were morphed from unique to stereotypical. Kwesi, the warrior-chef gave way to Kwesi, the flirt who likes to cook Indian food and happens to teach a self-defense class in the end. Geeta, the mature and well-rounded lawyer was traded in for a typical-looking airhead who acts like a teenager. Ahuja’s wife, a young oppressed bride with ambitions of her own, was altogether missing in the movie. As were the bougainvillea girls, who played an important role in Tilo’s image-conscious reality. I suppose it’s understandable that some of the side stories, involving the aforementioned characters, were cut down or out for the sake of telling the story of Tilo. But that was not the case. In the book, Tilo’s story didn’t always revolve around Raven (as it did in the movie). The author’s Tilo has a whole life before Raven. It was refreshing to read about Tilo’s trip to a department store, her few daring adventures around Oakland that she accomplished by herself. Of course, before Tilo became a Mistress of Spices who led an ordinary-seeming life, she had a bizarre upbringing that was dwindled to mere flashbacks in the movie. Where was NayanTara the unruly and mischievous child? Where was the explanation of why she chose to be named Tilo upon commencing her role as a Mistress? Where were the omnipresent telepathic snakes?! Even upon initial comparison (i.e. not re-reading the book or re-viewing the movie), I’m appalled at how many significant parts of the book were compromised in the making of the movie. One exception to this would be that the degree of exoticizing India was a notch higher in the movie, with the use of Indian musical instruments to bring each spice to life. The book is commendable for its memorable characters and unconventional use of language, myth, and religion. The relationship between Tilo and the spices is familiar because it’s the pull many of us feel at some point when caught between religion/rules and personal desires. Nonetheless, this was one of those books that should not have been made into a movie because it was obviously going to lose whatever charm its audience was holding on to. Maybe an animated movie would’ve done it justice.

 

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