Mistura review: Bárbara Mori simmers, never boils, in Peruvian kitchen drama

Bárbara Mori plays a wronged socialite who opens a restaurant in her own mansion, and the film about her does the one thing a fine-dining movie shouldn't: it stays calm. Mistura, a 1960s-set Peruvian drama now screening in UK cinemas, maintains what our source review calls "a gentle simmer, sedate and elegant" — elegant, perhaps, to a fault.

The Guardian's review sets up the expectation and then politely takes it away. Films about high-end restaurants usually deliver heat: "the roiling intensity of staff pushed to their absolute limits in the pursuit of gastronomic perfection." Mistura declines the boiler. The comparison that comes to mind isn't The Bear; it's a country-house melodrama that happens to own a stove.

Who is Norma, and why should we care?

Mori is Norma, a glacial high-society wife working a kind of Jackie Onassis chic — huge sunglasses, a massive blow-dry, makeup "thickly applied like armour." Then her husband humiliates her. He leaves, publicly, for a beauty queen.

Sympathy should follow. It doesn't quite. Norma treats her staff abominably, lashing out at housekeeper Rosa (Hermelinda Luján) and chauffeur Oscar (Cesar Ballumbrosio). The script wants a heroine in adversity; it has written a snob with a mortgage problem.

How does the restaurant happen?

It's Oscar who proposes the scheme — partly, the review notes, because he is "a bit in love with Norma." Open a restaurant inside the house, he suggests, and the mortgage gets paid. Norma's father was the French ambassador to Peru, and she inherited his passion for gastronomy.

Sort of. The script, as the Guardian drily observes, is inconsistent on this point, "since Oscar also says he's never seen her so much as light the oven." A chef-proprietor who has never lit her own oven is either a setup for growth or a plot hole. The review leaves that verdict to the viewer.

What does the film get right?

Production values, for one. The 1960s period detail reads as sedate and elegant, from the blow-dry downward. Mori's performance carries the film's central irony: a woman armoured in couture, gambling her house on a craft she has never practiced. That's a good premise. The execution keeps it at room temperature.

The supporting cast gives the story its warmth. Luján's Rosa and Ballumbrosio's Oscar supply the emotional stakes Norma refuses to provide herself. Their scenes are the closest Mistura comes to a kitchen fire.

Verdict

The review's position is measured but firm. Expect roiling intensity and you'll get a gentle simmer. Expect a food film and you'll get a class drama with canapés. Mori's glacial glamour holds the frame; the script's inconsistencies let it slip.

For audiences seeking Peruvian cinema's answer to the stress-fracture kitchen drama, the advice is simple: lower the flame. Mistura works as period melodrama, less so as gastronomic cinema — and its fate with UK audiences will likely depend on which of those two films viewers think they bought a ticket for.