More than a touch exotic.  Like the spices that are ever-present, the film has a range of flavours, some beguiling, some a touch sweet, others bittersweet.

The film has been adapted from a novel by the team of Gurindar Chadha and Paul Mayeda Burges, the husband and wife who have written What’s Cooking, Bend it Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice, all directed by Gurindar Chadha.  This is her husband’s first direction.  They bring a spicy multi-culturalism to their work: she is from and Indian family from Kenya, he is a Japanese Hispanic American.
 
In India, small girls are trained to be mistresses of the spices by a wise old woman.  They have to memorise the thousand or more spices available and learn their particular qualities so that they will be able to read people and recommend their spice.  They then scatter throughout the world.  Our heroine (former Miss India, Aishwariya Rai of Devdas and Bride and Prejudice), who is bound to live within her shop and remain unmarried (not betraying the spices by intruding any of her own desires), runs a spice bazaar in San Francisco where she does a great deal of good for her customers to whom she is not only devoted but dedicated.  She can offer positive spices, but she also has visions of disaster and tries to forestall these.

When an architect working on a nearby site (Dylan McDermott) has an accident on his motorbike and she looks after him, we know that her emotions are going to intrude.  Her confidence is shaken and she feels she has  betrayed the spices.  Will they destroy her?  Should she venture out of the shop?  Never see the architect again?

If you belonged to the Sceptics Society, you would dismiss all this as Indian superstition.  If you were a sceptic but attacked superstition only in Christian contexts, then you would express delight at the ‘magic realism’.  If you believed in magic and/or superstition, then there is no problem.

If you are wary of superstition but want to respect cultures, then, like me, you would probably see the spices as symbolic of human feelings and attitudes which become part of the symbol – along the lines of holy water or sacred oils.

It is all very sweet and romantic.

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