Mostly Martha (‘Bella Martha', 2002)

Look at you – so you watch German movies in the original, and they are no better than in the English version. Isn’t that really sad, though?

Mostly Martha is about a German chef that inherits a child from her deceased sister. The story revolves around this burgeoning relationship and mostly deals with the conflicts engendered by the conflict between child rearing and a full time job at odd hours.

Add a pinch of cooking class for the working class, a drizzle of romance, and a lot of scenes in kitchens and in restaurant floors, and you basically have the whole thing nailed down.

If I had to choose a movie about food, ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ would come to mind. This movie is too German to jibe with food. Martha is too German, the child is too German, even the approach to the Italian fellow cook is too German in its contrast with Germanness.

What do you do with a movie like that? The acting was pretty good, and Martha herself quite tasty. The story was not convincing. And what was the architect dude/neighbor there for? All in all, very confusing. I wished I had spent the time watching something else.