Review of “No Reservation”
No Reservations opens with Kate (Catherine Zeta-Jones) slowly describing the most tantalizing and mouth-watering recipe she knows. The camera slides around and around her lip-gloss in a kind of dance as she speaks seductively of tender quail and tempting truffle. Cut to a shot of her therapist. Sorry, that’s all the passion there is in this film. The rest is slick, uncomplicated, flawless and dull – more perfect pancake than sensual soufflé. And definitely no sauce.
Kate is a brilliant executive chef. She cooks at work. She cooks at home. She even cooks at her therapy sessions. She hasn’t had a relationship for years and runs her kitchen – in a chic boutique restaurant - with a cool detached professionalism, although there’s a brooding resentment for authority bubbling just below the surface. Of course what she’s really missing in her life is a man. And a child. Enter Nick (Aaron Eckhart) the impossibly good-looking sous chef who is forced to become her second in command. And enter Zoe (Abigail Breslin), her niece, who is forced to come and stay in the immaculate Manhattan apartment Kate maintains around the corner from the restaurant. Zoe won’t eat her aunt’s extravagant gourmet food. Nick loves to make pasta. Kate seems to be the only person who cant see what’s going to happen next.
This is the soft sparkly American world of romance. We are pretty sure how the story is going to unravel within moments of the set-up, and it does, but sadly without much feeling – other than that provoked by Philip Glass’ music. There are minor trials and tribulations, but none that provides anyone a real test, nor any that threatens the gentle and inevitable slide of the romantic narrative. It’s all too easy for Zeta Jones and Eckhardt who have nothing much to work with in Carol Fuch’s screenplay, adapted from a 2001 German film called Bella Martha. Abagail Breslin, however, shows why she’s in great demand with another strong performance as the little girl who needs love.
The film is billed as a romantic comedy, but it’s too gracious to be funny and too wholesome to be romantic. Australian director Scott Hicks – who notably directed Shine – keeps it stylish, but ultimately relies on sentimental montage to produce a lackluster story devoid of real heart and soul.
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