THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
A brief glance at the work of 93-year-old Frederick Wiseman is enough to make one dizzy. In fifty-six years of career and a good forty films, excuse me, the former Boston lawyer converted to cinema in the 1960s has documented the main crossroads and antechambers of American public life, from psychiatric hospitals (Titicut Follies1967) in town hall (City Hall2020), going through high school (High School I1968, and II1994), social services (Welfare1975; Domestic Violence2002), a NATO base (Maneuver1979) or a library (Ex Libris2017).
Based in Paris, the filmmaker opened a French branch within this monumental filmography, devoting a handful of films to France as an undercover defector, with the slick and laconic eye that characterizes him. Here again, the documentary maker tours institutions, this time cultural, The Comédie-Française or played love (1996), Dance. The Paris Opera Ballet (2009), Crazy Horse (2011), to which is now added, with Pleasure MenusMaison Troisgros, in Roanne (Loire), a large restaurant with three Michelin stars.
A question arises straight away. What reality can we grasp of France through the luster of such jewels, in this case the mecca of gastronomy classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site? What interests Wiseman is precisely the way in which these places induce their own staging: cuisine is no exception, as a specific form of representation that a country gives to itself as much as to the others. The filmmaker approaches it with the method we know for him, forged for a long time: going “around the owner” without any other comment than a suggestive montage, and the long time of the observation – the watch here achieving both one hundred and forty minutes.
An empire of concentration
Maison Troisgros, a family business spanning several generations, will therefore be available in all its components. The father, Michel, has entrusted the keys to the star-studded flagship, Le Bois sans Feuilles, where he always lends a helping hand, to his eldest son, César, while the youngest, Léo, runs the two adjoining tables, La Colline du Colombier and, in downtown Roanne, Le Central. The mother, Marie-Pierre, oversees the hotel side, and as an interior designer on the “decor” line of the various establishments.
Every institution being first and foremost a “machine”, Wiseman looks at its functioning, its workings. To do this, he pursues the trail of products, gleaned from the first scene by the chefs themselves on the Roanne market, then from various small local producers (breeder, wine grower, refiner, etc.), to be transported to the kitchens, taken in hand by the brigade, worked, transformed and finally assembled at this point of the process which is the plate. Even more, it is the range of practices surrounding the kitchen which are declined over the sequences, by capillarity, from table service to sommelier, passing through the various layers of relations with customers.
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