Cooking With Stella

Prominently displayed on the DVD cover (not pictured here) of Cooking With Stella is this endorsement from Omar Mouallem of Vue Weekly - “Canada’s answer to Julie & Julia”. I disagree with Omar. I don’t think Canada ever asked that question, and if it did, this movie doesn’t really answer it. A few important distinctions:

1. Julie & Julia stars Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. Look at the box cover on the DVD. There’s a picture of the two stars, the two people you see most on the screen, the titular roles as it were. In Cooking With Stella, the characters you see and care about most are Stella (Seema Biswas), Tannu (Shriya Saran) and Michael Laffont (Don McKellar). So why the fuck is Lisa Ray on the cover and her name listed second? She has maybe 10 minutes of screen time and is a raging cunt most of that time. Shriya Saran got shafted here.

2. Food. Cooking With Stella offers surprisingly little actual cooking. The story is mainly about the shenanigans of plucky house servant Stella Matthews and her petty thievery. Michael Laffont is a chef from Canada eager to learn the intricacies of Indian cooking. The movie gives us Stella’s clever tricks at overcoming crushing poverty by stealing groceries and overcharging for laundry services. At least Julie & Julia made me hungry.

3. Cooking With Stella gives us Maury Chaykin in a supporting role for comic relief. Julie & Julia gives us Stanley Tucci in a masterful supporting performance that is actually funny.

Cooking With Stella is a perfectly harmless, moderately amusing little movie. It wears its’ Canadian roots proudly and never pretends to be American, which I admire. Few things are more annoying than Canadian movies with Canadian casts pretending to be American. What’s that Sue Thomas tv show on global? You know the one with that deaf chick? Fuck off and stop pretending already. You’re not fooling anybody.

My overall point with this review is this: rent this movie, support Canadian cinema. It’s not something I would ever own. The title is clever but misleading – the movie is a cultural satire about a wily old Indian woman’s way of exploiting Canadian kindness and politeness to lift herself out of her station in life. It is sweet but predictable, safe and frugal in scope. It was filmed in Dehli, India, not that you get to actually see much of it. Biswas and Saran carry the load in this movie – they are by far the most interesting performances here.

I rate this 5 out of 10