And one more on "Food Flicks"
November 27, 2002 8:30 a.m.
Food on Film
The best food movies of all time.
An NRO Symposium
We asked some familiar faces to nominate their favorite food movies for the holiday weekend. A food movie, you ask? That's any film that features a groundbreaking culinary moment. Think of the garlic in Goodfellas, or the T-bones in Apocalypse Now. Get the picture? Okay, here's the menu. Dig in.
James Bowman
At the top of any such list must be Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast (1987), based on the novel by Isak Dinesen. The glorious, unforgettable Stéphane Audran appears as a French political refugee among the simple folk of a Danish village whose austere brand of religion matches their diet, which seems to consist mainly of salted fish. Though a Roman Catholic and a world-renowned chef at the Café des Anglais in Paris, Miss Audran's character lives simply among the villagers for years as a servant until one day she comes into some money and decides to spend it all on giving the villagers a proper meal as a thank-you for taking her in. Never has the cinematic potential of food been more gloriously realized than it is on the faces of these humble and pious fisher-folk who taste haute cuisine ? and perhaps a whole world of the senses as lived in metropolitan centers of which they have had no idea, for the first time.
The Scandinavians are perhaps both geographically and temperamentally well-suited to an appreciation of the contrast between outward bleakness and barrenness and the rich life of the senses. No one does this better than Ingmar Bergman in what seems to me his greatest film, Fanny and Alexander (1982). Like the later Babette's Feast, it associates dour Protestant Christianity with sensory as well a spiritual deprivation, but unlike so many other Bergman films it also has a warm, welcoming side, and its association of food with family seems particularly appropriate for the Thanksgiving season, though its own occasion is a Christmas feast.
Food and family are also the theme of Thomas Vinterberg's Celebration (1998), which takes as its setting the 60th-birthday dinner of a Danish paterfamilias which is disrupted by one of the old boy's grown sons who, on rising to give the toast, accuses him of child molestation, both of himself and of a sister who has recently committed suicide. You might expect this kind of thing to be both ideological ? it's that dratted patriarchy again, ma! ? and bad for the appetite, but, in fact, it is neither. Vinterberg's light touch with this very black comedy somehow manages to keep the promise of the dinner and its delights alive until the end, as well as to suggest that families are more resilient than we might think.
Food and family are also linked in Campbell Scott's and Stanley Tucci's Big Night (1996), which takes a depressingly pessimistic view of the relations between the sexes but does at least allow for genuine love and affection between two Italian brothers and restaurateurs living in New Jersey in the 1950s. Mr. Tucci as the worldly brother, Secundo, and Tony Shalhoub as Primo, the genius of the kitchen who is unwilling to compromise with the disgusting tastes of the 1950s in order to make their little restaurant a going concern are both terrific, as is the fantastic meal Primo prepares when they think Louis Prima is coming to dine there. Once again, food is made to stand for the pleasures of home and family, and the more so that these seem far away.
The family headed by paterfamilias and master chef Mr. Chu (Sihung Lung) in Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) is also routinely "dysfunctional" as they gather for what one of them calls the "Sunday dinner torture ritual." But it is a family that, however unsatisfactory it may seem in other ways, is said to "communicate by eating." At first it seems that communication has broken down, and it is perhaps not coincidental that Mr. Chu says he can no longer taste anything. He is compared to Beethoven, who created magnificent music while deaf. Unlike that of Beethoven, however, the incapacity of Mr. Chu, being mainly symbolic, is ameliorated as his estranged children begin to be, to one degree or another, reconciled to him. Needless to say, the family that supplies the savor of life is the organic kind, not the processed and synthetic variety currently being recommended to us by Al and Tipper Gore.
James Bowman is movie critic of The American Spectator & American editor of London's Times Literary Supplement. Find him at JamesBowman.net.
Matthew Feeney
Tampopo: In our current low-carb Zeitgeist, this movie, with its loving treatment of noodles, might seem a little dated. But it is a deft and adventurous and very funny comedy.
Goodfellas: I know, Goodfellas is not actually about food, but it includes a stunning amount of eating, and it contains the most vivid, savory cooking scene in my movie-memory: As Ray Liotta giddily narrates the cushy prison life of wise guys, Paul Sorvino slices translucent strips of garlic with a razor blade and drops them into a pan sizzling with olive oil. When I watch this scene, a Homer Simpson voice comes into my head and cries, "Awww, why can't I go to prison?"
Eating Raoul: Some smart aleck was bound to put a film about cannibalism on his list. At least I didn't include Alive. Anyway, Eating Raoul is like a very funny story as told by a quivering lunatic.
Monty Python's Meaning of Life: That's some wafer-thin mint.
Matthew Feeney is freelance writer in Washington, D.C.
Victor Morton
Tom Jones, the Oscar-winner for 1963, looks a bit dated now in its show-offy look-ma-no-hands mannerisms, but it has several superb scenes, including maybe the most-famous (and erotic) eating scene in movie history ? Tom's seduction of Mrs. Waters. The ribald way Albert Finney and Joyce Redman look hungrily at each other, mostly in alternating shots, while sucking on fruit and chicken bones captures Tom's naughty scalawag charm.
British cuisine is so bad that even Britain's greatest director, Alfred Hitchcock, felt free to make fun of it in Frenzy. The inspector in the plot's murders is married to a woman studying to be a gourmet chef and in several scenes serves up some of the most unappetizing concoctions man hath wrought, including braised pig feet and a fish-head soup. As the inspector put it while plunging into a traditional English breakfast, "To eat well in this country, one must have breakfast three times a day."
But to consider whole films, probably the funniest food movie ever made is Tampopo ? a series of loosely connected sequences about the very Japanese obsession with the perfect bowl of noodles and the perfect woman to run the noodle shop. It mostly follows an Eastwood-like loner's search for these perfections but some of the funniest scenes have nothing to do with this plot strand ? certainly, you'll never look at egg yolks or live crawfish or listen to Japanese people eat in quite the same way.
I'm also quite partial to two wickedly-black-comic Luis Bunuel parables that reverse each other's premises. In The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (in French) a group of rich, perfectly coiffed zombies are stuck in a nightmare world where they forever plan meals, but never eat. They keep getting interrupted by ... whatever tickles Bunuel's fancy ? from a body in the next room and the appearance of the Army to each other's dreams and (my favorite) an appearance onstage.
In The Exterminating Angel (made in Mexico), the upper classes have had their meal. But now, for no apparent reason, they just can't leave and "society" in the room degenerates into panic, suicide, black magic and various perversities and barbarities.
Victor Morton is Washington-area cinephile who has written for the Washington Times and the online journal 24fps.
Andrew Stuttaford
Ask me about films and food and I generally think of popcorn. The culinary content of the movies themselves usually passes me by. One exception is Babette's Feast. This bleakly sweet Danish film set in 19th century Jutland (yes, I know that this is not the most promising of descriptions) tells how a lonely French cook uses food to bring a suggestion of the world's pleasures to the members of an austere protestant sect. The film is a quiet delight and the feast is quite literally a sensation.
An idea of food's redeeming power can also, rather surprisingly, be found in the fevered depths of Apocalypse Now. The night before an attack on a Vietcong-controlled village, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), finds himself at a beach barbecue ? T-bones and cold beer ? with Colonel Kilgore's (Robert Duvall) air cavalry. Willard sees the power of this meal and its danger: "The more they tried to make it just like home, the more they made everybody miss it." The fact that it is a barbecue, probably the cooking technique used by our earliest ancestors, is an appropriate choice in a film devoted to describing a descent into barbarism. It's probably no coincidence that Willard is first given his orders over a rather fancier, fussily elaborate, lunch, a symbol of civilization that, like civilization itself, can be lethal ? A high-ranking officer offers the captain some shrimp, "if you'll eat it you will never have to prove your courage in any other way." Kurtz will soon prove otherwise.
The remaining three movies in my selection are included for the light they shed on those little didactic messages we used to be told about food when we were children. 9½ Weeks shows that it is not always wrong to play with your food, while the unpleasant fate of Mr. Creosote in Monty Python's Meaning of Life is a warning that gluttony really can be a deadly sin. Finally, Soylent Green ("it's people, it's peeeoople?") is a reminder to always be sure that you know what you are eating. Bon Appetit?
Andrew Stuttaford is a contributing editor of NRO.
Terry Teachout
My guess is that most film buffs, asked to draw up a top-five list of favorite food movies, would opt for what I think of as food-specific films ? Babette's Feast, say, or the recent Mostly Martha (which I loved). Instead, I have chosen to stir the pot by listing five screen comedies containing scenes in which food plays a secondary but significant role:
Support Your Local Sheriff: James Garner, the dashing young sheriff of a Wild West town, is served a home-cooked meal by Joan Hackett, his landlord's adoring daughter, who contrives in the process to cover her face with flour and set her dress on fire.
The In-Laws: Peter Falk eats Alan Arkin's split-pea soup while soberly explaining to him how an evil South American dictator is planning to flood the world with counterfeit currency, thus precipitating an international panic whose symptoms will include "atonal music." (I have never laughed so hard in a movie theater as I did when I first heard this line.)
My Favorite Year: Mark Linn-Baker feeds Jessica Harper the most romantic takeout-Chinese dinner imaginable, then tries unsuccessfully to teach her how to tell a joke. (Several other funny meals are eaten in My Favorite Year, but this is the best one.)
The Truth About Cats and Dogs: Janeane Garofalo and Ben Chaplin have a very long phone conversation that begins with their simultaneously making and eating tuna-salad sandwiches and ends with...well, I'd better not say.
National Lampoon's Animal House: John Belushi does something I have always wanted to do with a mouthful of mashed potatoes, but never had the nerve to try. Ah, well, there's always Thanksgiving! |
