Having been lucky enough to have travelled in Bali, India and Italy, and with a shaming love of self-help books (The Life Audit by Caroline Righton is a fave!), I was really interested to see Eat Pray Love.
I trotted off to the cinema on Saturday afternoon and sat amid of sea of hot flushes to watch the film, which stars Julia Roberts, Javier Bardem and Billy Crudup.
Now, having never read the book, I don’t know how accurate it is but the default setting of the film was ‘patronising’.
It begins in New York, where Julia Roberts’ character Liz appears to ditch her husband on a whim after a celestial being tells her to go back to bed when she gets up at night.
Like a therapy vampire, her new man tells her about an Indian ashram and, rather than inviting him, she ditches him and swans off there.
Not before a stay in Italy, where she scoffs pizza and mocks the locals for their expressive hand-gestures in a particularly cringe-worthy montage of her and her new BFFs wandering the streets of Roma.
Next stop India, where she falls out with an American on an ashram and grumpily pushes a dishcloth around the floor.
The film even appears to confuse arranged and forced marriage in one conversation about a young ashram volunteer’s wedding day.
Next stop, it’s off to Bali for a bit of edgy chat and high flirting. Liz asks her friends to fund a woman’s home, instead of buying Liz birthday presents she doesn’t need. Unfortunately, my inner cynic was asking why she didn’t just fund the house herself, given that she was clearly given a hefty enough advance to write the book in the first place.
At this point I actually debated sneaking out but Javier Bardem’s sexy bearishness kept me in my seat.
Anywho, before I knew it Liz had gone mental at poor Javier and stomped off.
In all, the film passed an afternoon but it was painted in such broad strokes that the characters were really just caricatures and it had all the cultural realism of the Lion King.
And that even features a singing warthog.
(My photo is my sister Helena and I in India) (I was going to put one each up of Italy, India and Indonesia but thought that might be a bit too navel-gazing).
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