Fridae

Snicker all you want at the cheesy premise of Eat Pray Love, but I think Elizabeth Gilbert is on to something here. What constitutes a good life and living well? The ancients might answer: knowing how to enjoy yourself, how to align your soul with the universe, and how to care for others. Or as how Alain de Botton, the last accessible Western philosopher, might put it – how to eat, pray, and love.

As a film, Eat Pray Love stays very close to the sub-genre where WASP Americans are schooled in the wisdom of good living and good loving by natives in exotic Third World locales (or the Mediterranean; they’re the same thing anyway). If you’ve watched Letters to Juliet this year, you wouldn’t be surprised at how the story plays itself out.

What this film has going for it is the cornucopia of food porn in it. Yes, Eat Pray Love is like one of those travelogues (say Gwyneth Paltrow in Spain: on the road again) – but with Julia Roberts as your host, going on food binges in Italy in between yoga lessons in an Indian ashram and partying on Bali’s beaches, and mixing with the charming third world people in their backward, crumbling cities.

In spite of its tired premise, the story of Eat Pray Love is good natured, the cinematography is so beautiful and so full of eye candy, and Julia Roberts so charming that you too will be vulnerable to its charms.