German filmmaker Sandra Nettelbeck's debut feature MOSTLY MARTHA is a veritable international hit, substantiated by spawning a Hollywood remake NO RESERVATIONS (2007), a star vehicle for Catherine Zeta-Jone. As an exemplary “foodie romance flick”, the film is toothsome yet never cloying, its love story feels earned rather than forced, and Nettelbeck nimbly avails herself of the contrasting cultural/culinary distinctions between Germany and Italy to canalize the opening-up rite of passage our protagonist Martha (Gedeck).
Martha is a fussy and a tad stuck-up chef of a restaurant in Hamburg, whose hardened, territorial, defensive carriage impedes her having a more gregarious social life, still single, the job is everything to her. But a bereavement shatters the status quo and detracts her from her monomania, after her sister perished in a car accident, as the next of kin, she becomes the interim guardian of her school-age niece Lina (Forest), before the latter can be taken by her Italian father, who has been long out of the picture and married and lived somewhere in Italy, in the meantime the two have to mark time together, only a post-traumatic Lina proves to be a hard nut to crack for Martha, who has to assume the role of a surrogate mother with much pains.
Concurrently, in her kitchen, her absolute sovereignty is challenged by the new sous-chef, the Italian epicure Mario (Castellitto), whose devil-may-care geniality squarely counter to Martha's perfectionist vein, but as the tried-and-tested rule of opposites attract attests, their foe-to-friend-to-lover trajectory is par for the course and naturally integrated with Martha and Lina's on-off concord.
A saxophone-profuse soundtrack is a go-to if trite choice to accompany a burgeoning romance takes place in a less palatable locality, even if we muster enough tea and sympathy, Lina's petulance and rebellion still takes much effort to stomach, and Castellitto is an enchanting foil though Mario's sanguine nature is wanting in variation as a full-blooded character, which might be partially due to the fact that Gedeck is holding court from stem to stern with her magnificent malleability and emotive precision, especially her poised beauty is entrancingly soothing and distancing at once, Martha is almost a meta-representation of all the virtues one can glean from an emancipated modern woman, except for a funny bone, which luckily can be complemented by her significant other, and more than anything,it is pretty bracing that MOSTLY MARTHA's gratifying coda doesn't slump to the same saccharine substrate like many other of its ilk.
referential entries: Nora Ephron's JULIE & JULIA (2009, 7.7/10); Stanley Tucci's BIG NIGHT (1996, 7.1/10); Silvio Soldini's BREAD AND TULIPS (2000, 7.2/10).
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