Food, Glorious Food: “Big Night”

I’ve always enjoyed movies about cooking. Given that we all have to eat, I guess it’s not remarkable that food preparation can be used in so many ways to comment on the human condition. In the 1987 Danish film Babette’s Feast, a French refugee introduces an austere Scandinavian family to the joys of good food . . . and by extension the earthy pleasures of life.  Taiwan-born director Ang Lee, in his 1994 Eat Drink Man Woman, uses a retired chef cooking for his adult daughters as a way to explore Chinese  tradition as well as the relationship between generations. In 2023’s The Taste of Things, starring the luminous Juliette Binoche, a pairing involving love and loss unfolds through the relationship of a gourmet and his loyal cook. And we can’t forget the Pixar animated film, Ratatouille, which proves that you’re never too small to be very good in the kitchen.

 Earlier this year, Netflix presented Nonnas, a star-studded TV movie based on the real-life story of a New York man. He paid tribute to his late mother’s talents as a home cook by launching a popular Staten Island restaurant in which the kitchen is staffed by a clutch of Italian mamas. This slight but charming film is notable for casting veteran actresses of Italian descent (like Lorraine Bracco, Brenda Vaccaro, and Talia Shire), and having them fight epic stove-top battles over cooking techniques and regional specialties.

 Then there’s Big Night, a 1996 labor of love co-written and co-directed by Stanley Tucci. Tucci, a hyper-versatile character actor who was Oscar-nominated for playing an ominous neighbor in 2009’s The Lovely Bones, is most fondly remembered (by me, at least) as a sympathetic gay art director in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada. He also made an impressively down-to-earth Roman Catholic cardinal in last year’s Conclave.

 Throughout his career, Tucci has not been shy about proclaiming his love for good cooking, especially of the Italian variety. In 2021 he hosted  Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, a CNN series that followed him through the land of his ancestors. That same year he published Taste: My Life Through Food, a memoir that spent sixteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Other Tucci publications include What I Ate in One Year and several cookbooks.

 So it’s no surprise that when Tucci set about to make an original film, he put food preparation at its center. Big Night casts Tucci and Tony Shalhoub (of Lebanese descent but comfortable playing a wide range of nationalities) as Italian-born brothers determined to create a fine-dining restaurant near the New Jersey shore. In the film, Primo (Shalhoub) is the older brother, an artist in the kitchen who’s intolerant of shortcuts and trendy gimmicks. Tucci himself plays Secundo, the would-be practical brother who’s determined to see the business succeed, but has his own lapses into fantasyland. While locals cram into a livelier but far less authentic Italian-American bistro nearby, the brothers are desperate to stay afloat. That’s when, for reasons the film makes clear, the duo decide to risk everything on an elaborate gourmet banquet that’s spectacular but in many ways poorly conceived. This is a story about the restaurant business—yes!—but even more about the push-and-pull relationship between two brothers with very different visions of what they want to achieve in life.

 Big Night is not an Oscar-winning kind of movie. But it nabbed several writing awards, including an Independent Spirit nod for Best First Screenplay. Clearly, Tucci’s got talent in areas other than acting, and I can’t help wondering what he’ll serve us next. 

 (Here's a fascinationg addendum, provided by Hillel Schwartz, a friend and loyal reader:)  Stanley Tucci played Paul Child (Julia Child's husband) in the 2009 movie Julie & Julia. Tucci wrote about his deep admiration for Julia Child in his Taste and in an article for TIME Magazine: https://time.com/6103409/stanley-tucci-taste-julia-child/.  Ironically, Tucci was diagnosed in 2017 with a tumor at the base of his tongue, and lost his sense of taste and smell, but this was successfully treated with chemotherapy and radiation, although he had to have a feeding tube for six months. And now his co-star in Big Night, Tony Shalhoub, has his own tv series, where he goes around tasting versions of bread in different ethnic cuisines.

Sweets for the Sweet: “Wonka”

Timothée Chalamet, all of 28 years old, has certainly been around. In 2017, barely 21, he rose to international fame as a lovestruck Italian teenager discovering his gender preference in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name. The role brought him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, along with a raft of other honors, while he was also being feted as the “cool” boy who deflowers Saoirse Ronan’s character in Lady Bird, written and directed by Greta Gerwig..

 He has also portrayed a drug addict (Beautiful Boy, 2018), a young cannibal (Bones and All, 2022), a revolutionary student (in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, 2021), and—just for variety—the handsome young love interest in Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women (2019)  Very soon audiences will be able to see him as heroic Paul Atreides in Part II of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the science fiction classic, Dune.

 But at the moment he’s busy making chocolate. I’m talking about his starring role in the prequel to everyone’s childhood favorite, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971). I suspect many of us have fond memories of Gene Wilder playing a mature Willy with bright blue eyes, flyaway hair, and an impish sense of humor. (And I suspect most of us were turned off by Johnny Depp’s more sinister approach in 2005’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which bears the name of Roald Dahl’s original novel.)  Movie franchises being what they are, it wasn’t surprising that someone would decide the tale of Charlie Bucket’s visit to the Wonka factory required a prequel. And so we get to find out, via Chalamet’s performance, just how the young Willy founded that amazing factory in the first place.

 Roald Dahl, of course, was famous for being curmudgeonly. A specialist in creating monsters of various odious sorts, he tempered his sweet story about the magic of chocolate with some very sour characters. The new Wonka does something of the same, with none other that Olivia Colman playing an evil landlady who keeps Willy and a clutch of other unfortunates in thrall, once they’ve had the misfortune of spending a night in her seedy hotel. Her sardonic gloating over her victims is something of which I suspect Dahl would approve. I’m much less sure he would have liked the treacle in the story, like Willy regarding chocolate-making as the legacy passed down to him by his dear, departed mother.  (She’s played in several brief scenes by Sally Hawkins, always a genuinely delightful performer with a heartbreaking smile—but here asked to be part of a saccharine moment of magical beyond-the-grave reunion.)

 The  new film  benefits from lots of fizzy and phantasmagoric visuals (oh, that giraffe!), in a charming European setting. I’m not sure, though, that it needed to be a musical. The various pleasant but not memorable songs (sung well enough by Chalamet and others) simply make a longish film longer. There’s also lots of time spent on building the backstories of some of the lesser characters. A writer of my acquaintance wonders why, in today’s cinema, we can’t simply accept quirky characters for who they are, without giving them all past lives that might possibly lead to sequels, thus broadening the Wonka Universe. This comment made me think of a film with some similarities, Chocolat. In it, the past life of wandering candy-maker Juliette Binoche is left mysterious, and we’re none the worse for that.

 I can’t say enough, though, about Hugh Grant’s role as the drollest of Oompa-Loompas. Now that he’s too old for romantic roles, he’s sure enjoying letting his freak flag fly.

 

For Valentine’s Day and Beyond . . .”The Taste of Things”

Anatomy of a Fall is one of ten films in the running for the Best Picture Oscar.  This twisty courtroom drama, filmed in French, also copped four other nominations, including Best Director (Justine Triet), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Actress (Sandra Hüller, also mesmerizing as the Nazi wife in The Zone of Interest). One nomination that has eluded Anatomy of a Fall is for Best International Feature. According to Academy rules, the candidates for this foreign-language category must be nominated by their nation of origin, and no more than one nominee per country is permitted. The film folks of France, in their wisdom, chose not to so honor the very impressive Anatomy of a Fall. Instead they backed a romantic drama that is just now making the rounds in the U.S. Its English-language title is The Taste of Things.

 If you watch The Taste of Things,  you’ll understand why it won the French seal of approval. It stars, first of all, the luminous Juliette Binoche, sometimes in the altogether. And it focuses on two subjects beloved by the French populace: l’amour and la cuisine. This story of a circle of gourmands wining and dining in the nineteenth-century French countryside is full of witty chat about the joys of food, about how it would be even more exciting to develop a brand-new dish than to discover a brand-new planet. Food, in this narrative, comes before everything, even sex: marriage is wittily described as dinner and then dessert. For these characters, it’s perfectly logical that Adam ate an apple before discovering just what else Eve had to offer.

 Here's the situation: Dodin, a clearly well-heeled landowner so passionate about food that (to his embarrassment) he’s known in some circles as the Napoleon of gastronomy, has a complicated relationship with his live-in cook, Eugénie. Together, in a kitchen entirely lacking today’s electrical appliances, they craft fabulous meals that delight his circle of male friends.  Eugénie knows she’s welcome to join these gatherings, but she seems radiantly content to keep to her place in the kitchen, enjoying the labors of food preparation and the hearty satisfaction of their guests. At times she also welcomes Dodin as a bedmate, but continues to make it clear that she will not marry him, that she requires the right to her own solitude, when she so chooses.

 Nonetheless, these two are bound together so tightly, thanks to their mutual passion for food and food preparation, that it seems impossible to imagine them ever completely apart. A curious sidenote: lead actors Binoche and Benoît Magimel were romantically involved for five years early in this century. They welcomed a daughter together, but later moved on. In the film, though the relationship faces a moment of parting, love survives in a mysterious but truly appropriate way. 

  I have no idea what kind of cook Binoche might be in real life. But the camera captures her (and Magimel) deftly crafting the most simple but elegant of dishes. She smiles beatifically while crimping a crust, decorating a cake, surveying her garden produce, or watching the delight of a smart child who appreciates the subtle ingredients of her broth. There’s something earthy about her that suits this role, and I recall a similar pairing of Binoche and delicious flavors in Chcocolat. In that lovely English-language film, directed in 2000 by Lasse Hallstrōm, she played a rather magical maker of confectionary delights that transform the malcontents of a small French town into happy hedonists. If you’ve ever wondered about the link between Binoche’s beauty and a just-ripe pear, this is the film for you.

 

 

 

 

Calling All Fans of "Call My Agent!"

                 

It was my own agent (Hi, Stuart!) who first turned me on to Call My Agent!. This French series originally titled Dix Pour Cent (or Ten Percent), was spread over four seasons, beginning in 2015. Which means its memorable stars have by now all moved onto other projects. When I get to the end I’ll certainly miss them.

The series explores day-to-day life in a talent agency, where starry clients are the norm. The brilliant title sequence begins with a young woman in full eighteenth-century aristocratic attire. She seems to belong at the court of some King Louis, until we watch her beautifully shod foot step over a series of wires and cables. At which point we know we’re on a movie set . . . and before long the same fille is striding out the door, clad in sneakers and tight jeans.

  Part of the fun of Call My Agent! is that it features real-life celebrities who seem to be having a ball playing slightly ungainly versions of themselves. They’re always in crisis mode:  two old-school performers are in the midst of a longtime feud; an up-and-comer slated to star in a road movie has panic attacks when behind the wheel; a well-known twosome break up just before they’re scheduled to shoot a film that will tap their romantic chemistry. An American viewer can’t fully appreciate these unfamiliar French vedettes, but as the series wears on it presents some names well known on this side of the Atlantic. One example: Juliette Binoche, who in the second-season finale appears as the celebrity host of the Cannes Film Festival. Not only is Binoche trying to elude a stalker but she’s also forced to make her big welcome speech while wearing a hideously poufy designer gown. I won’t soon forget her desperate sprint to locate the ladies’ room behind the scenes in the cavernous Palais.

 Though the warts-and-all French celebrities are charming, the series’ focal figures are in fact their representatives, who’ll do (just about) anything to further their clients’ screen careers. The jostling among them is sometimes reminiscent of Mad Men, though this is hardly a period piece reflecting a bygone era. People of color play some of the featured roles, and one of the agents—the uber-passionate Andréa—is unabashedly gay. She’s a vivid presence, as is the fashionably scruffy Gabriel (who perhaps unwisely gives his heart to a fledgling actress), and the dapper Matthias, whose personal secrets come to the fore over the course of seasons 1 and 2. But the audience favorite may be wide-eyed young Camille, the diligent assistant whose journey into the business of agenting we follow over the course of the series. Is she the Peggy Olson of Call My Agent? Not exactly, but I look forward to following her trajectory in seasons 3 and 4.

 There was a time when episodes of a mostly comedic TV series could be viewed in any order, since (during a season, at least) no big transformative changes took place. But in Call My Agent!, as in so many of today’s series, there is a constant unfolding of events that change everything. I’ll avoid any big reveals, so as not to spoil the fun, but do expect a glimpse of the softer side of Andréa, and wait for the moment when the starchy Matthias melts into a puddle of deep emotion. Minor players too are full of surprises.

 Call My Agent! is a terrific way to improve your grasp of colloquial French. Thank goodness, though, for subtitles.