52 Films by Women Vol 7. 21. INDIA SWEETS AND SPICES (Director: Geeta Malik)
Completed in 2019 but first shown at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival in 2021, India Sweets and Spices , written and directed by Geeta Malik, is an amiable but not especially ambitious New Jersey-set mother-daughter story that affirms female solidarity in the face of hypocrisy. Its basic message is that Indian men whose marriages are arranged by their parents are bound to cheat. Its supplementary message is that Indian mothers suppress their true personalities for the sake of appearances. Whether you can reveal your true self and keep the nice house with the swimming pool out back is open to debate, but India Sweets and Spices is a feel-good movie set in a well-appointed neighbourhood of Ruby Hill, filled with affluent Americans whose families migrated from India. We admire the earrings, the fake décor, not to mention the books that you cannot read, and the complete absence of racial hatred – here, there are class tensions, instead. We especially salivate over food. How can we be...