Ricardo de Montreuil’s Mistura takes a sound idea about Peruvian identity and gives it one of the safest dramatic shapes available. Set in Lima in 1965, the film follows Norma Piet (Bárbara Mori), a Franco-Peruvian socialite abandoned by her husband and shut out of the society that formed her. She responds by opening a restaurant.
De Montreuil proposes that Peru’s cuisine draws its character from Indigenous, African, European, and Japanese histories, and that a country taught to admire foreign refinement might find itself by valuing what it already has. The conviction is genuine, although the discovery continues to benefit Norma more than everyone around her. Oscar (César Ballumbrosio), Rosa (Hermelinda Luján), and the restaurant staff who gather around her bring the knowledge that makes Norma’s reinvention possible. It remains her story.
Norma initially plans a French restaurant, having absorbed the idea that European food belongs to culture while Peruvian cooking belongs to necessity. Her disgust at the market, with its animal carcasses and visible labor, makes the prejudice almost comically plain. From Brazil, the attitude resembles what Nelson Rodrigues called the “mongrel complex”: waiting for foreign approval before considering something native worthwhile.
The restaurant’s change of direction also recalls the cultural cannibalism proposed by Brazilian modernism, though the histories are distinct. French technique is kept, chewed up, and put to use with Peruvian ingredients. On this point, Mistura is persuasive.
Nicolás Wong makes that argument attractive before the screenplay has made it convincing. The dishes look expensive even when their ingredients have come from the market Norma despised, and editors Luis Colina and de Montreuil hurry from preparation toward the moment of approval. Mori and Ballumbrosio close their eyes over a bite, look at each other, and nod gravely. They behave as though the food has settled a constitutional dispute.
The gesture is funny once; repetition makes it a substitute for curiosity. We see that something tastes good, but learn little about how one tradition changes in contact with another. Tim Williams’ score often treats this mixture as settled, smoothing over conflicts the screenplay has hardly begun to address.
Mario Frías fills Norma’s old life with polished furniture, enormous rooms, and servants trained to disappear inside them. The country club works in much the same way. The market breaks that arrangement, but the shock belongs entirely to Norma. Newspaper reports and glimpses of unrest during Fernando Belaúnde Terry’s first presidency remain near the edge of the film’s handsome reconstruction.
Wong puts Norma in the rear of the car and Oscar at the wheel, making Driving Miss Daisy impossible to ignore; Ballumbrosio’s gray curls and genial restraint strengthen the resemblance. A few compositions also recall the class layout of Parasite (2019). Bong Joon-ho used the car to expose the humiliations of employment; Mistura uses it for lessons. Oscar speaks, Norma absorbs what she needs, and they drive on.
At first, Oscar looks capable of having a story outside hers. He plays cajón in the country club’s staff room, flirts with a waitress, laughs while another employee insults the boss out of earshot. Ballumbrosio’s loose physicality suggests a social life taking place behind Norma’s back.
Once her marriage collapses, that life vanishes. Oscar becomes the person who knows which door the film should open next. His disappointment with Norma produces frank exchanges about her prejudice, but none lasts long enough to threaten their working arrangement. Her husband’s racism provides another opening, and the screenplay lets that pass too. Ballumbrosio wisely underplays the role. The screenplay gradually turns Oscar’s patience into a convenience.
Mori preserves some of Norma’s unpleasantness even as the screenplay rushes her toward enlightenment. Her accent, posture, and clipped way of addressing the household make Norma’s privilege feel learned, repeated until it has become reflex. When the protection disappears, Mori catches the panic underneath the snobbery. She is especially good when Norma’s humiliation turns into anger rather than instant sympathy.
The screenplay, however, cannot tolerate that difficulty for long. Oscar suggests she open a restaurant, and a woman who has not cooked in years is suddenly ready to build one. A few meals and car rides undo prejudices the film has spent its first act presenting as Norma’s entire social education. Colina and de Montreuil cut around the harder process: Norma arrives at each necessary realization just before the story needs her to act on it.
The Rosa subplot is where Mistura’s generosity becomes difficult to credit. Norma fires the longtime housekeeper over missing cheese, humiliating someone who has cared for her since childhood. When Rosa’s grandson is injured, she inexplicably calls the woman she now refuses to speak to. Norma pays for treatment with her restaurant money. The incident proves that she is already better than Rosa believes, although the screenplay has not earned the phone call.
Later, Norma’s son covers a month of expenses, and the employees agree to work without pay. Their finances never enter the discussion. Solidarity means that those with the least security absorb the cost of preserving their employer’s dream.
Melodrama can thrive on coincidence. Mistura uses it to prevent consequences from settling. Norma takes pills with wine and collapses just as Oscar decides to enter rooms he has respected as private throughout the film. Her hospitalization consumes the remaining money; her son and the unpaid staff promptly remove that problem.
Mildred Pierce made entrepreneurship worsen its heroine’s domestic and class fractures. De Montreuil treats the restaurant as a cure for every fracture his script introduces. The kiss between Norma and Oscar is the worst example. Their relationship has developed through employment and instruction, without sustained romantic interest. The kiss feels like the screenplay remembering, at the last possible moment, that it had promised a love story.
This leaves Mistura with a worthwhile belief and a timid way of dramatizing it. Its confidence in Peru’s mixed inheritance is easy to admire from Brazil, where imported standards of beauty have produced lasting embarrassments. Mori gives the film more abrasion than it seems to want, and Ballumbrosio remains likable after Oscar loses most other qualities.
De Montreuil imagines social change mainly as a wealthy woman learning to appreciate what her employees already knew. They supply the food and eventually even their wages; Norma receives a business and a new identity. Mistura wants its restaurant to stand for Peru, but never asks who owns the restaurant or the image. Norma finds the country. Oscar, Rosa, and the others are left staffing the revelation.