Arguably Aishwarya Rai Bachchan is the only actor to have worked with a filmmaking husband-wife duo. After starring in Gurinder Chadha’s Bride & Prejudice, Aishwarya starred almost immediately after in Gurinder’s husband Paul Mayeda Berges’ much-discussed Mistress Of Spices.
Paul admitted he was initially sceptical about Aishwarya Rai playing the protagonist Tilo in his directorial debut Mistress Of Spices. “But when she (Aishwarya) read the part I was amazed at how she responded. She jumped right into the character and embraced it.”
The debutant director was also dismissive of rumours that his wife ghost-directed the film. “I’d never try to underplay the fact I have learnt a great deal from Gurinder and that I respect her tremendously as a director.I very much feel like a citizen of the world. I am very close to Gurinder and her family, so a part of me feels Punjabi. The world is such a small place. I feel as Japanese as I feel Indian. That multi-culturalism comes across in all our films.”
Mistress Of Spices is set almost entirely in San Francisco. That’s the city where Paul spent a lot of his years. “For Gurinder and me, embracing a multiplicity of cultures is very natural. I don’t get alarmed by it, only excited,” he told me during the film’s release. “I learnt a lot during all the films that we wrote. I always used to supervise the second unit of Gurinder’s films. That was such an education.I don’t feel I made Mistress…”separately from her. We wrote the script together. We both read the book nine years ago and fell in love with it. It is a very sensuous tale.”
Paul tried to retain the magic surrealism. Cinematographer Santosh Sivan was an absolute magician. They had a lot of fun planning the look and feel for the film. Paul wanted the flavours of the spices to leap off the screen.He desisted from putting in lots of special effects. “That would only distract from the film. Santosh helped me to make the film magical without resorting to gimmicks. To bring Tilo’s world of spices alive, we had to work on the magic without losing out on realism.”
Although Mistress Of Spices was a critical and commercial failure, Aishwarya was very proud of it. “It didn’t feel like shooting at all. As it is, Gurinder Chadha’s unit was like family after Bride & Prejudice. Her husband Paul was with us right through that film. So was (cinematographer) Santosh Sivan who has always shot me like a dream, ever since my first film, Iruvar (in Tamil).The rest of the unit, with whom we shot on the Isle Of Man and London were English. We didn’t feel like we had shot a movie. It was a picnic, honestly!And before you ask how I compare Gurinder and her husband as directors, I don’t! No trick questions, please! They are two individuals with two completely different visions and films. Mistress Of Spices is as different from Bride & Prejudice as Devdas from Hum…Dil De Chuke Sanam!”
Aishwarya was gung-ho about her new character. “Lalita in Bride & Prejudice and Tilo in Mistress Of The Spices are two different individuals, with two different looks. I worked really hard on Tilo’s look. There was no time to prepare, no rehearsals, and we had to do it on our own. So I had to work out Tilo’s graph. Also, her clothes, saris, attitude… they’re all mine. Of course, Gurinder and Paul had their own idea of the way she needed to be projected, and I respected that. I’m always the director’s actress.”
Mistress Of Spices tackles the age-old relationship between the Indian woman and the spices. Aishwarya relied on olfactory nostalgia to create her character’s mood. “Those aromas from my mother’s kitchen came alive in this film. Paul has gone to great lengths to connect the world of spices with the world of human perceptions. Is it a very sensuous film? Oh, I don’t know! Sensuality is a state of the mind and soul. Mistress Of Spices tickles the palate.”
