Movie Review : Cooking with Stella

Rating : 4/5
Genre : Drama
Year : 2009
Running time : 1 hour 45 minutes
Director : Dilip Mehta
Cast : Seema Biwas, Lisa Ray, Don McKellat, Shriya Saran
Kid rating : PG-13

A young diplomatic couple, Maya (Ray) and Michael (McKellar) comes to Delhi. Their Canadian Embassy accommodations come with cook/housekeeper services. Stella Elizabeth Matthews (Biswas) is their cook, and has been the cook for several Canadian families in the past. She is old and a little crotchety but well-versed in the art of keeping saheb-memsaheb happy. She has also learned ways to make the system work for her. Maya and Michael settle in to their new surroundings but don’t quite know what to make of Stella and her quick-silver moods. Michael, a chef and temporary house husband who dreams of setting up his own restaurant on his return to Canada, wants to learn cooking from Stella. Meanwhile Maya hires a young nanny named Tanu (Saran) to help with their baby. Tanu, an honest girl, moves in but worldly-wise Stella doesn’t like the look of her.

With Maya and Michael given to intermittent discord, Stella and Tannu at loggerheads, and the uneasy teacher-disciple relationship between Stella and Michael, life on the home front is brimming with tension. Things come to a head when Stella is mysteriously kidnapped . . .

This is a very interesting film, short and simple and well-nuanced. Dilip Mehta explores Indian society’s class structure in this witty film. He gives us a unique eye-view of each of the parties in the household: Maya and Michael are nice people, and naively trusting of the capable help, Stella having lived a servant’s life has learned wilier ways, and Tannu, out to support her penniless family, clings to her honesty and integrity. All of them come from different backgrounds, societies and experiences and have learned to fend for themselves via different philosophies. Stella is crafty but drawn humorously – she knows what to say when and how exactly to present herself. Her employers are not only unaware of Stella’s extra-curricular activities, but they in their Western we-are-all-equal sensibility strive to treat Stella like a friend. She, of course, is completely befuddled with their egalitarian attitudes towards the help (her), but finds ways to make it work to her advantage. Tanu, by comparison is pretty virtuous and straight-forward and cannot stand Stella’s capricious ways.

Seema Biwas is quite fantastic as Stella, as expected from an artiste of Biswas’s caliber. Lisa Ray is adequate as the overburdened diplomat Maya Chopra, finding her feet in a new job in vaguely familiar surroundings (Maya is supposed to be half-Indian). Don McKellar as Michael Laffont, the disgruntled husband forced to put his job on the back-burner still comes across as pretty amiable and good-natured. And Shriya Saran as virtuous, untainted Tannu rounds off a capable cast.

I quite liked the fact that the film moved unpredictably, and the story seemed well-fleshed out and rang true. The details seemed right, which I was thankful for because in a lot of these high-brow, arty, foreign-conglomeration type films, the details are often not right; the films are done up through an outsider’s eyes. Witty and threaded with dark humor, “Cooking with Stella” is an enjoyable film. Do watch it – it is currently available on Netflix Streaming.