Bonus: Mastering the Art of French Cooking
Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros meets The Taste of Things
Watching
Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros (2023)
In a filmmaking career spanning over 50 years, the 93-year-old Frederick Wiseman has rarely deviated from a technique that has won him devotees who consider him the greatest living filmmaker1. His latest outing, Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros, sticks to his tried-and-true formula: after choosing an institution he’d like to know more about and spending several weeks on location amassing hundreds of hours of rushes, Wiseman whittles the footage down into a monumentally long film. Menus-Plaisirs clocks in at four hours on the dot, which makes it only his third-longest movie in the last ten years. No interviews, no voice overs, no archival b-roll, just whatever fly-on-the-wall sights and sounds Wiseman picks up in the field. You never watch a Wiseman movie expecting any direct editorializing; he leaves it to the viewer to suss out meaning from his montage.
The institution under examination in Menus-Plaisirs is the Troisgros clan, a family of chefs who have been running restaurants in central France for four generations and boasting three Michelin stars for half a century. Their flagship location, we learn at the very end of the film, operated continuously in its original, rented building for 86 years before patriarch Michel and his son César moved their kitchen to a modern new home, a glass-enclosed space abutting a country house that has been refurbished into a hotel. We spend much of the film shuffling between the dining room of said establishment, where patrons range from a couple celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary to a group of boisterous American foodies, and the kitchen, an immaculate, open space without the conventional range hoods, allowing for unobstructed sightlines from one corner of the room to another.
Along the way, Wiseman journeys outside the walls of the main restaurant with César and his brother Léo (also a chef) to visit the family’s two other outposts and, perhaps most interestingly, the farms where they source their ingredients. A trip to a cattle ranch includes a lengthy discussion of the rancher’s soil-preservation techniques. A visit to a cheesemonger pulls back the curtain on an expansive and never-before-seen cheese maintenance facility. These site visits are rich with both gastronomical and ecological insights, essential detours for understanding the broader systems that keep the Troisgros businesses afloat.
While the Troisgros name may appear in the title, Wiseman’s film is uninterested in giving the family the standard celebrity-chef treatment. In fact, one of the benefits of the movie’s runtime is that it gives every worker involved in the business a fair share of the spotlight. Plenty of time is spent with the front of house staff, who are shown memorizing all the intricate details of the day’s menu and furiously taking notes on diner accommodations. In one humorous but also revealing shot, a woman is shown spending upwards of a minute finicking with a spoon to make sure it rests on a plate at just the right angle. In the eyes of Wiseman’s camera, no job is too menial to make a difference to the restaurant’s reputation.
As for the Troisgros family themselves, much of what we see of their work involves a lot more talking than cooking. Toward the start of the movie, Wiseman sits his camera down with Michel and César for well over ten minutes as César plans a menu and his father nitpicks his choices. During the dinner rush, Michel wanders out to the dining room and regales customers with stories about his culinary influences and about how the family is doing. He’s performing a very particular kind of hospitality labor, putting a human face to the food and no doubt giving clients the Michelin-starred experience they’re paying big money for. But as Wiseman depicts it, Michel’s job is no more or less important to the smooth running of the whole operation than anyone else’s labor inside the restaurant or out on farms in the surrounding countryside.
Even so, there is indispensable knowledge that a seasoned chef like Michel offers in the workplace. During a lengthy dinner-prep scene, Michel enters the kitchen in search of the culprit who didn’t drain a pot of lamb brains of blood before it coagulated. A young chef steps forward apologetically and, rather than berate him, Michel pulls him aside and sits him down with an enormous copy of Auguste Escoffier’s Guide Culinaire. Michel reads the entry on brains aloud, emphasizing the part about draining the blood, then sends him back to work with an admonition to spend more time studying up on the wisdom of the greats.
The Taste of Things (2023)
If a four hour movie about cooking is too much to stomach, The Taste of Things should whet your appetite. The first film in seven years from Vietnamese-French director Trần Anh Hùng, The Taste of Things was a mini sensation at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Best Director prize. Based extremely loosely on a Swiss novel from the 1920s, it’s an unabashedly more romantic film than the comparatively more unsentimental Menus-Plaisirs. The movie is set near the dawn of the twentieth century and takes place pretty much entirely on the grounds of a grand French country house with a basement kitchen straight out of an Architectural Digest featurette. It’s escapism of the highest order.
Juliette Binoche plays Eugénie, the personal chef to master cook Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel).2 We learn that the two have been cooking together, and frequently sleeping together, for twenty years. After a brief vegetable-picking prologue, Hùng throws us directly into the fire with a justly celebrated sequence of Eugénie and two younger assistants preparing breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the house. Hùng choreographs this cooking scene, which lasts some twenty minutes, with panache and plenty of dappled sunlight. Instead of shooting in long takes, he favors quick cuts that focus on the essentials: chop this carrot, sauté that onion, baste this meat, boil that fish. I am not above the simple charms of well-made food porn, and this film transcends the label; a shot where Eugénie produces a puff pastry larger than her head from a heretofore unseen oven prompted one of the funniest audience reactions I have ever heard in a theater.
For a moment it seems as if The Taste of Things will have something interesting to say about gendered ideas of labor at the end of the 19th century. Specifically, that moment is the first time Hùng cuts away from the cooking, to show Dodin holding court upstairs with his gourmand buddies. Alas, this doesn’t quite come to pass. Eugénie is rather satisfied with her station in life, even if that means constantly waiting on men. Is it just wishful thinking that a woman in her place would know this much contentment? Well, no matter; in Bouffant, Eugénie has found her culinary equal, and the respect with which he treats her sustains their personal and professional relationships.
As a romance first and foremost—and a very good one, at that—The Taste of Things is less attuned to systems and structures than Menus-Plaisirs. Instead, Hùng uses his film to explore the personal side of cooking in greater detail. Dodin and Eugénie are not merely technically proficient chefs: they’re also possessed of a great attentiveness to the qualities of the food they handle and the people they cook for. In one of the film’s subplots, a prince invites Dodin and his buddies over to his mansion for a feast. The prince’s chef rattles off a lengthy and indigestion-inspiring menu, but rather than show us any of the food Hùng cuts ahead to the kitchen at Dodin’s house, where the fellas are having a laugh with Eugénie about how poorly-judged the meal was (we also learn that the prince kept them dining for eight straight hours).
In a related plot thread, a young girl from a neighboring farm shadows Eugénie in the kitchen. Dodin senses that she may have what it takes to become a great chef someday herself, so he puts her to a test. Sitting her down with a bowl of soup, he asks her to pick out all the flavors. She rattles off ten without missing a beat. Later, when circumstances compel Dodin to hold auditions for another chef, he invites the girl back to taste the candidates’ cooking and learn from their mistakes (of which there are many).
What Dodin and Eugénie share besides mutual attraction, and what they both hope to cultivate in this protégée, is a vision of what cooking is for. It isn’t for showing off, nor is it a purely functional enterprise. Understanding food is a gateway to understanding the Other, and in one iconic scene Hùng makes this idea explicit by drawing a direct visual parallel between Eugénie and a dessert that Dodin makes for her, toiling over it to the point of perfection. By very different means than Wiseman, Hùng arrives at a conclusion that complements the ideas in Menus-Plaisirs: if it’s true that you are what you eat, so much the better to eat food that’s been offered with love and care—and to give the same in return.
Yours truly among them.
Binoche and Magimel were, for the record, formerly partners in real life.