The film, already nicknamed by many critics as 'Mistress Without Spices' has bombed unceremoniously in the United Kingdom.
It may end its run in just about three weeks. It opened with a paltry $150,000 on just about 30 screens. On the other hand, the Akshay Kumar film Humko Deewana Kar Gaye grossed about $300,000 in its second weekend across the country.
The Guardian's influential critic Peter Bradshaw, gave Mistress Of Spices a single star (out of a maximum five) in the reputed London daily newspaper.
Peter Bradshaw
Friday April 21, 2006
The Guardian
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'Annoying' ... The Mistress of Spices |
Aishwarya Rai - is there a wishier, washier, wimpier actor anywhere in the known universe? Rai wafts and simpers through yet another film, this one a sub-magic-realist romance: she plays the mystical proprietress of a spice store in San Francisco, sorting out customers' emotional problems with her sensuous wares. Ooooooh! Sort of like Juliette Binoche in Chocolat, only more annoying, if that's possible, which sadly it is. She gets it on with a hunky customer, for one coyly photographed night of passion: her very first, we can only assume. Whatever else has changed afterwards, her lip-gloss is shimmeringly intact.
The heroine of The Mistress of Spices has special gifts and is also told she must never use them to advance her personal interests. An orphan with powers of divination, Tilo is trained in her native India in the culinary, pharmaceutical and mystic use of spices. She later becomes a key figure in the Subcontinental-Indian community of St Jos, California, and is courted by a hunk of an architect (Dylan McDermott), who, it transpires, has some mystic native-American blood in his veins. In this fey tale, beautiful former Miss World Aishwarya Rai plays the spice girl, and the one-sided conversations with the spices in her shop provide the kind of creepy experience that would make a cobra feel like shedding his skin. It's the work of the husband-and-wife team who made Bend it Like Beckham, and from soccer saga to spice odyssey must have seemed a logical move.