Author and educator Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt once said,
“Food is symbolic of love when words are inadequate.”
This is how you can easily decode the recipe for love. It is an uncomplicated metaphor like no reservations, the roman girl, a taste of romance, woman on top and chocolate where colorful sweet, spicy cuisine is like magic causing passions and emotions. Emmy-nominated director Ron Oliver’s most recent venture is an alluring story with right ingredients for a propitious relationship linked with allegory of cooking.
Recipe For Love tells the story of Lauren Hennessy, played by Danielle Panabaker, critiquing cooking for Food & Entertainment Magazine’s test-kitchen. She loves to write and cook; her biggest dream is to be a skilled cook just like celebrity chef Julia Child’s, from famous culinary institute Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.
On the other hand, Dexter Durrant, played by Shawn Roberts, is an over confident and over-sensitive chef-n-host of his own TV cooking show. Dealing with his delinquent behavior and attitude is a demanding and exhausting task for all the people around him. He’s smart and brilliant but stiff-necked stubborn. Although his life is quite gloomy but he maintains the sham for the reason he’s renowned personality – believes this is his one and only option.
Lauren’s boss offers a reasonable payment to her, only if she agrees to ghost-write a cookbook of an inflexible Dexter. Both writer and chef dislike the proposal and started with a clash over irreconcilable food preparation methods. Dexter challenges and disagrees with Lauren in every manner particularly by arguing over every recipe development.
However, after a while their cold war turns into a tantalizing romance as they develop an enduring love for each other. They expressed their love with care and suitableness, for instance, attractive endearing smiles and convincing glances during petite moments. Regardless of Dexter’s bad temper, Lauren chooses to quietly trust, care and patiently supports him. As a result, he started to have feelings for her. He converts from a stiff-necked to a polite chap. Dexter even showed Lauren how to cook from the heart and soul.
Best known for Perfect On Paper and Beethoven’s Treasure Tail, Ron Oliver’s directorial project is full of symbolism, sumptuous food with rich ingredients, passion and desire. He superbly handled the script of Michael Murray and added glamour along with artistic as well as dramatic features to a light subject, eventually spinning it into an amazing experience for spectators.
The on-screen chemistry of the lead pair is stunning; you would definitely be impressed by their convincing acting skills. Panabaker looks hugely appealing; she amazingly portrayed Lauren’s susceptibility and openness. Roberts contentedly depicted a complete control freak person at his job while a casual carefree attitude in his home and kitchen-garden. Murray’s controlled dialogues sound like spontaneous tête-à-tête for the lead pair who talked about food, friendship and love.
Some of the negative points of the movie include patchy editing, constantly changing lights, Peter Allen’s lifeless music and a little bit hurried climax. Despite the few drawbacks, it has numerous scenes which are complicated to direct and depict, however, they are carried out reasonably.
On the whole, Recipe For Love’s sketch is quite evident as well as fantastically simple, but it will be an engrossing experience – a delightful cooking-themed love story for you. It is specifically ideal for people like me who are utterly bored of action flicks, but love to watch story based romantic and cooking movies with diverse culinary-style clashes.
I would like to rate it three on the scale of five.
