Lent: half-cooked Apple sauce (critic)
The delicacy concocted by Martin Bourboulon is a little fat, even if the reconstruction of Bonaparte Paris is spectacular.
The soufflé quickly fell. The biopic on Marie-Antoine Lentpresented in preview last night, for the opening of the Séries Mania festival, advances as one of the television events in the spring (she will be released on April 30). A large historic epic in costumes, cooked by Martin Bourboulonthe director of the impressive diptych The three musketeers (in 2023) and carried by Benjamin neighborcesarized hero of fantastic Lost illusions by Xavier Giannoli. The recipe for success in short. At least enough to make our mouth water. Except that Lent We stayed on our stomach.
The intrigue tells the Paris of year VIII, after the coup d’etat of 18 Brumaire. France lives under the yoke of the Bonaparte consulate. Near the Palais-Royal, the young Marie-Antoine Carême is a prodigy of pastry. He learned everything with his “father”, Sylvain Bailly who has just been arrested by Fouché, Minister of Police. Spotted by the first consul in person, it was finally Talleyrand who takes him under his wing and makes him climb the ladder of a post-revolutionary French company still changing. Between the splendor found of worldly salons and the hidden political tensions, Antonin Carême tries to make Bailly release by imposing his art on the palaces of the powerful … that he executes so much.
The fresco on the father of modern gastronomy could have been a refined feast. It is actually available as a pop and tangy piece and tuning, which collapses under the weight of its excesses. Preferring flamboyance to authenticity, the series takes coarse liberties with reality, to draw the portrait of a rebel in the stove. Benjamin neighbor makes the cook a gifted and mutin teenager, and transforms Lent In James Dean Parisien Insoumis.
However, the historical reconstruction is of rare richness. Filming in real sets (the Tuileries, the Garnier Opera, the Royal Palace etc.) brings an undeniable value, and allows you to admirably take the pulse of this troubled period, containing the political intrigues that gravitated around Bonaparte. But this rigor ends at costumes and places. Lent Prefers to play the card of the Rock’n’Roll history, where the Haute-Société de la time is erotic to excessive, in tape-to-the-eye staging. If we can appreciate the freedom of tone, this excessive rereading leaves a funny taste in the mouth and sometimes borders on caricature, to transform Fouché into a naughty of Cartoon.
And then there is gastronomy. The series is not the ode to the culinary art that could have thought. Lent Likes to give way to the fatty staging of the tasting, where each bite turns into a vulgar display. Plans tight on licked fingers, pastries engulfed in lascivious sighs: we are far from the chopped delicacy of Tran Anh Hung. While Dodin puffy sublimated cooking into visual and sensory poetry, Lent Reduces it to an overbidding of primary impulses.
Lent, season 1 in 8 episodes, to see on Apple TV+ from April 30, 2025.
