In the Saif Ali Khan-starrer Chef — adapted from the 2014 Hollywood original by Jon Favreau — grilled cheese sandwiches are replaced by pizza parathas. This quite obvious change in menu defines the limits of this adaptation … and its imagination.

Favreau’s film about a talented chef whose life flips over after a bad review sits between Cowboys & Aliens (2011) and The Jungle Book (2016) — and it shows. Here was a man desperately running away from blockbusters (before Cowboys, he directed back-to-back Iron Man movies). This guy needed a breather.

The creative freedom Favreau indulged in away from big-budget movies was liberating. Made without the nit-picky oversight of studio executives, his Chef turned out to be a perfect little dish.

The Indian version, however, is overcooked and unappetising. Director and co-screenwriter Raja Krishna Menon (Airlift) is overthinking his ingredients. Also, his spices are all wrong and his technique is sloppy.

Chef overthinks its ingredients, the spices are all wrong and the technique sloppy

Using Favreau’s template, Menon resets the palette to India. To make the film more desi, and to give his leading character (Saif) some emotional weight, he adds a back-story for motivation. When the camera opens with Saif’s voiceover describing the making of an aloo ki tikki as “a smell of masalas that hits one’s senses like barood [gunpowder],” you know the storytelling is done for. And that’s just the first scene.

In the following scene we see Saif, a chef in a New York restaurant, angrily approaching a table. “Do you have a problem with my food?” he asks, his temper flaring like a furnace. “Yeah, it’s not as good as it used to be,” says the gora who didn’t like what he ate. The chef’s snappy reply is, “I don’t tell you how to do your job,” before he breaks the man’s nose and ends up in jail.

Subtlety is not in Bollywood’s genes, but did it have to be so flagrant?

Such an argument doesn’t take place in Favreau’s film, because it didn’t need conventional angst. That film’s main confrontation happens much later, and its relevance is much deeper in context. Favreau (also playing the lead role in his film) runs a successful restaurant whose owner (Dustin Hoffman, brilliant in a small role) doesn’t want him to change the menu to impress a high-profile food critic. That character is at war with his boss and the critic — and neither one is at fault. Favreau’s main drive in Chef was of telling a unique, subtle and drama-free story.

In comparison, Menon’s version is quite shortsighted. For instance, Menon may have felt that critics (both of film and food) would flare up by their portrayal as haters, so he left the critic scene out, eliminating the very cause that sets the plot in motion. In its place, he amplified the angst of his central character, turning him into a cranky man-child.

After jail, when Saif’s chef struts back into his kitchen he shouts at his staff, pointing out the difference between a chef and a bawarchi. When he gets sacked by his boss neither his staff nor his assistant-cum-girlfriend (Sobhita Dhulipala) leave with him. Clearly, no one likes this guy — and that includes the audience.

Soon, he is seen brooding in New York as a song plays up in the background to make his gloom feel profound (it doesn’t work). A few cuts later he is back in India, bonding with his son, revamping a double-decker bus as a food outlet (no spoilers here — it’s in the official synopsis and the trailer).

Anyone can argue that Chef is a father-son road-trip movie. Superficially, it is just that. However, this misleading assumption was actually Favreau’s ace in the hole. Favreau’s film had built on that notion, but had evolved into the story of a man needing some time to figure himself out. It didn’t strive for stereotypical drama nor a proper conclusion. It was a parallel for what Favreau was feeling at the time.

Published in Dawn, ICON, October 15th, 2017