To leave one day to The Bear, why is fiction also obsessed with cooking?
In the cinema and on the platforms, the characters of chefs spread and reign behind the stoves. Modern Rockstars, the chefs inspire filmmakers, like Amélie Bonnin who opened the Cannes Film Festival with one day.
After the success of the programs Top chef On TV, Disney+ opens a breach with The Bearin 2022. The series on high gastronomy immediately transformed Jeremy Allen White into Hollywood darling. In the shoes of chef Carmy, the actor appears obsessed with the work and his personal ambitions. One foot in an emergency, the other in chaos, he seems to be born to embody this character under pressure, who plays his reputation with each dish. Results ? 3 Golden Globes, 6 Emmy Awards and a fourth season on fire.
Carefully erect plates, millimeter cooking, refined dishes … “” “Cooking is a very visual job, so we can film it ” explains the filmmaker Amélie Bonnin. But behind these resolutely cinematographic aesthetic plans, high gastronomy seems to have become a formidable narrative arc, both a source of conflict, communion and exhausting challenge.
At the start of the year, Love in the present featured the insatiable passion of an eager for success, struck by illness. The discreet The Grill illustrated the boiling in cooking in a sumptuous black and white, before the Repair From Régis Wargnier, just out in theaters. If cinema multiplies the appearance of heroes wearing a hat, the small French screen makes its contribution to the menu. “” “We never have a good kind monopoly, a good subject or a good character. It is almost rather reassuring to see that we are not the only ones wanting to stage chiefs ”, declares Martin Bourboulon who has just put his cameras in the kitchen for his new series Lent, Currently available on Appletv+.
A cinematographic profession
This year, the Cannes Festival also invites us to devour Juliette Armanet’s game in Leave one day, which opened this 78th edition. In this first enchanted feature film by Amelie Bonnin, the singer turns into a winner of Top chefcaught up by its family roots in a road relay in Loir-et-Cher. Far from the prestige of the new gourmet restaurant that she is opening in Paris, the culinary star revives a painful past and the terroir cuisine.
If Go on a day is above all a film that speaks of the persistence of memory, and its beauty, it also testifies to the reality of the profession of a woman who is looking for our time. “” “It was this dimension that interested me: what would be a woman who is looking for 40 years today in Paris? How would she constitute her team? How would she talk to people? There is a rigor, a precision in the work which is essential at a certain level of gastronomy but there is an undeniable sweetness and respect. This is what I wanted to film”Reveals Amélie Bonnin. With her apron, the character of Juliette Armanet therefore stands out as a machine, with a rhythm and precise gestures, in a brigade which is mainly made up of women.
For his first feature film, UrchinHarris Dickinson imagines a hero in full redemption. Multi -writer’s drug addict and criminal, Mike leaves his bars for the stoves and makes the chef’s job, the second chance miracle. The opportunity to learn discipline, precision and even submission, in a distraught fight of customer satisfaction. If the restaurant in which Mike is propelled is nothing from the hotel The White Lotusthis retraining in chief has everything of an exemplary social ascent in a high -worked era. However, as Amélie Bonnin reminds us, “It was a job that had everything to be a garage path, for children who were not good at school. At the time, there was an opposition between intellectual and manual circles which for me never made sense. Now we are told that it can be as glamorous to exercise this profession.
The chefs, these stove rockstars
For his part, Martin Bourboulon takes a jump in the Napoleonic era to resuscitate the chief Antonin Carême. Accustomed to period films, the director took care to disguise Benjamin Voisin as a rock’n’roll cook who wanders in cooking, with his children’s eyes. As if he arrived in a toy store, the slalom camera between the different preparation stages. With his crane cameras plans, Martin Bourboulon concocts an epic story by showing the whole boiling that spreads in the kitchen, to reflect what is really going on. With his “Sex, Food and Politic” card, the filmmaker finds the right recipe to stage the fate of the first famous leader, but above all to reconstruct the Paris of Bonaparte in a spectacular way.
By extension, reality TV has starified the chefs. Now ultra -mediated, they have become our modern, glamorial and fantasized rockstars, offering the industry a precious material for cooking these often tyrannical and irreducible figures. Anti-hero of the stoves, a determined woman or symbol of omnipotence, will we soon be close to indigestion with these new gastronomic figures which could ultimately force-feed the rooms?
