Helen Mirren plays a prickly French chef known for dishing out bonbons and bon mots in the trailer for the upcoming drama The Hundred-Foot Journey.
In the film — produced by Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey — Mirren is Madame Mallory, a chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant in the south of France. She holds her kitchen to impossibly high standards and lambastes her staff for the slightest misstep.
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“Last night, we served this,” Mallory says, holding up a limp piece of asparagus. “In this restaurant, the cuisine is not an old, tired marriage — it is a passionate affair.”
Tensions simmer and boil over when an Indian family opens a restaurant across the street. “If your music is anything like your food, I suggest you tone it down,” Mallory admonishes the Indian restaurant’s chef (90210‘s Manish Dayal).
Oscar-nominated Lasse Hallstrom — who helmed the food-centric Chocolat and last year’s Safe Haven — directed the film from a script by Locke writer-director Steven Knight. The film is based on the 2010 novel of the same name by Richard C. Morais.
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Winfrey has been a longtime champion of the novel, putting it on her O magazine’s 2010 summer reading list. Spielberg directed Winfrey in 1985’s The Color Purple.
Disney releases The Hundred-Foot Journey on Aug. 8 and is presumably hoping it enjoys success similar to that of Fox Searchlight’s 2012 sleeper hit The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
Twitter: @_RyanGajewski