The mistress of spices - 2005

I didn't like this, no. So much fuss for nothing. The story is simple to explain: Tilo (Aishwarya Rai) comes from India. She has a special gift, she can see things, and because of this she was kidnapped when she was a little girl. The criminals wanted to exploit her talent, and killed her family to get to her. Tilo managed to escaped, and 'met her destiny'. She was raised by the First Mother among all the other girls that were there to learn about spices. She became a mistress of spices: she knows them all, and with them she can help people, but there are rules to follow: the usual one, which is to use your power to help others not yourself, and other two: she must never leave the store and must never touch the skin of others - or be touched.
Now she's in the San Francisco Area (well, she must have been away from spices for quite some time after all, or did she teleport in the shop from India??). She's a shopkeeper, and she never leaves her shop, the "spice bazaar". She uses her spices to help a man in his relationship with his girlfriend, and a young kid who is bullied at school but much more at home I'd say, an Indian man who's recently found a job as a taxi-driver, and an old man who is unbearable, I couldn't stand him and what he said.
Angry at his granddaughter because she goes out and lives her life instead of staying obediently home waiting for her family to find a husband for her in India :-/
She listens to them all and tries to help them with her spices without them realizing.
One day she sees a man out in the street and everything changes. Architect Doug (Dylan McDermott) almost ruins her life without knowing it. Since the first moment she saw him she keeps thinking only of him, and when he touches her and she doesn't pull back, the spices get angry at her and ruin everything she was trying to do for those people, like the man breaks up with his girlfriend and the kid finds the wrong friends, becoming part of a gang. She thinks of going back to India but can not give him up, so she goes out with him, spends the night with him then she leaves him, prepared to burn her shop and perish with her beloved spices, but she's left unharmed, and now the spices have understood that she'll never abandon them and are no more angry at her, so in spite of all the rules she is now going out with him, walking in the world and touching him whenever she wants, and she's still the mistress of spices, they still talk to her. So much fuss for nothing, couldn't the spices understand her devotion without getting angry and taking it out on those poor people who knew nothing about their anger?
Mah, I didn't like it at all; prepare to ruin her life or even die for a man she barely knows, and those rules, what were they? Nothing more than a whim? She broke them all (even the first one, giving him a spice that will make him remember to come back to her), so why were there those rules after all? Only because the spices have a 'capricious nature'? Bah, I didn't like it.


ITA la maga delle spezie