THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
It’s the last Friday before Christmas, the busiest night of the year, and there’s no more turbot. The chef of a gourmet restaurant in London forgot to place an order, it’s bad luck. To see him paralyzed in the courtyard of his establishment, his legs in cotton, his mouth pasty, his eyes glassy, how not to think of his French counterpart, Vatel, who, in 1671, committed suicide for a problem of tide and fish dishes?
After having received only two baskets of peach out of the hundred ordered, Nicolas Fouquet’s butler, ashamed of not being able to feed the three thousand guests of the parties offered to Louis XIV, went up to his room and threw himself on his sword. Having become a symbol of French culinary excellence, it thus inaugurated the world history of chef suicides, the last notorious example of which is that of the Franco-American Anthony Bourdain.
The Chef (Where Boiling Point, a very apt title used in Anglo-Saxon countries) thus recounts the extreme pressure undergone by the leaders, in this case Andy Jones, a starry forty-year-old, who tries to stay the course despite his addiction to drugs and alcohol, during a nightmarish service. Filmed in sequence (a real digital seamless), the evening leaves him no respite, between a quality control which costs his business two points following the misuse of a vegetable sink up to the allergy rant from a client.
collective tragedy
Thirty-seven actors and a hundred extras to choreograph on a 360-degree set, assistant directors disguised as waiters with a headset, only four takes… The undeniable technical performance of this fat-free thriller makes the story devilishly effective. Throughout this one-and-a-half-hour immersion, small bubbles appear ready to explode against the walls of this large, seemingly chic and stylish pot. Among others: an underpaid second, a poorly trained intern, a late apprentice actress waitress, a not serious dishwasher and a room manager, daddy’s girl, torn between the demands of the room and the kitchen’s abilities, who ends up by swallowing his tyrannical penchant for the toilet, the only quiet corner of the restaurant.
British director Philip Barantini’s big idea, 41 (also an actor, spotted in the HBO miniseries Chernobyl, 2019), is to distinguish kitchen and dining room as little as possible, avoiding the caricatural and expected face-to-face between backstage and the show. By situating the two in an open space, subject to the same sound and light regimes, respectively hushed and subdued, this amalgamation between tables and stoves has the effect of giving a fairly clear and delicate idea of the chain interactions leading the characters of one either side to find themselves embroiled in a collective tragedy.
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