Meryl Streep Does It AGAIN In Julie & Julia

• Film Review

By Sumaya Samarasinghe

Films about cooking have something truly magical about them, well this is just a personal opinion because I am sure many of you would never be able to sit through a feature film which is all about chopping, stirring, tasting and consuming…

Way before Julie & Julia was made into a movie, food was a frequently used theme in features.

Ang Lee had directed the great  Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, Penelope Cruz came as a chef in Fina Torres’ Women On Top. Like Water For Chocolate, based on a novel by Laura Esquivel is the story of a young girl named Tita who expresses her passions and feelings through her cooking, which causes the people who taste it to experience what she feels and more recently Catherine Zeta Jones was the cold and driven chef who finds love in  No Reservations. Food is a recurring theme in European features, and my mouth waters thinking of Juliette Binoche in Chocolat, bending over her stove and preparing sweets which will change the lives of all the villagers and her neighbours.

Food is magic, therapeutic, binding and generally has a positive effect on everyone.

Julie & Julia is about the life of famous American Chef Julia Childs and the parallel life of Julie Powell, a young New Yorker who to conquer the frustration of her day to day professional life decides to cook in one year the 524 recipes from Julia Child’s book , Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Child’s story takes place in the beautiful Paris of the 1950’s while Julie Powell lives in post 911 New York. Both women have common points: incredibly supportive husbands and a love for food which is bordering on poetic.

Julie starts to blog about her cooking adventures and the once failed writer begins to garner quite a following; so much so that she becomes obsessive about her target and her husband leaves her for a few days feeling she has become irrational and self centered.

Directed by Nora Ephron, the film flows beautifully. Despite the overbearing personality of Meryl Streep whom I felt was louder and even more imposing than the actual Julia Childs. Julie & Julia is first and foremost an ode to food and its positive effects. Streep got yet another Oscar nomination for her performance. But for me, the film was not so much about her, but rather about the creative beauty of a dish, about watching the face of those who enjoy it, the surprise when their tongue and mouth comes into contact with a chocolate pudding never tasted before or a perfect coq au vin. Eating is a pleasure which should not be denied to anyone, it would therefore be a sin to not allow yourself two hours of bliss with  Julie & Julia.