Mistress of Spices

The Mistress of SpicesI love the actors in this movie, but I don't think I can fully stand behind it, or them. Several creative and colorful images enhance the production. I felt particularly fascinated by the language of spices, whose vocabulary, I must admit, seemed to have been expanded for the purposes of the plot.

Despite the imagination of the tale, and several of the interesting thematic elements, I can't help feeling that a moral outweighs the artistic considerations. In my own words, the movie seems to be saying that you can have sex outside of marriage (outside of the rules of your culture), and still have the support of your traditions. It doesn't work like that. As I watched, I constantly found myself saying those exact words: "It doesn't work like that." The mechanics of the theological realm created inside this story seem alien to my Western theological roots. The gods Tilo (Aishwarya Rai) worships are her spices. They speak to her in a kind of sub-linguistic revelation, helping her help others, but they have established some arbitrary rules (no touching skin, no love, no leaving the store). Tilo pushes the rules and disobeys her spices, who punish her by turning her good intentions into various pseudo calamities, until she turns her future fully to the spices (in a scene I didn't entirely understand). Apparently, at that point, a *spoiler alert* deus ex machina decision by the spices says she's allowed to break the rules too, because they trust her now.

It doesn't work like that. The whole film was full of the kind of paranoid superstition that will drive you mad (or at least, obsessive/compulsive), and none of the consistency of theological doctrine. Religions generally have had a somewhat tenuous relationships with causality, but in this movie I think they pushed too far.

I think, looking at the film as a value system, allowing Tilo to break the rules undermined the strength of her position as a figure of faith and tradition, and knowing the jealousy of the spices, I'm not certain it was necessarily a bad thing, but I sense an inconsistency that I can't quite put my finger on.

I dunno. It's very romantic. Check it out if you like romantic bollywood.

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