Monthly Archives: January 2016

  • Chef

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jon Favreau (2014)

    Carl Casper (Jon Favreau) is the head chef in a successful Los Angeles restaurant.  Carl is driven and passionate about continuing to create new dishes but, although anxious to succeed and firmly in charge of the kitchen, he’s not the martinet-cum-prima donna you might expect a screen chef to be.   However, his work is his life:  his marriage to the glamorous Inez (Sofía Vergara) has ended and, while he regularly sees their ten-year-old son Percy (Emjay Anthony), the boy senses that his father’s heart and mind are otherwise, culinarily engaged.   Ramsey Michel (Oliver Platt), a food critic who strikes fear into chefs and restaurateurs but whose good reviews helped propel Carl’s career, is coming to dinner.  (The critic’s combination of names is nothing if not familiar to viewers of British television food programmes.)  Carl is eager to impress with new dishes but the restaurant owner Riva (Dustin Hoffman) wants him to stick to old favourites to keep the diners happy:  how would Carl feel, Riva asks, if he went to a Rolling Stones concert and they didn’t play ‘Satisfaction’?  Carl is disappointed and uneasy but he galvanises his team into action and, by the end of the evening, has forgotten entirely about his misgivings:  he looks up Michel’s online blog and starts reading the write-up to the others with complete confidence.  Michel’s verdict is damning.

    While Carl used an iphone to find the review, it turns out that he knows nothing about social media or YouTube:  he doesn’t understand the difference between a text and a tweet so that, when he sends an aggrieved, aggressive message to Ramsey Michel through Twitter, Carl doesn’t realise how many people will see it.  He challenges Michel to return to the restaurant – to sample what Carl is really capable of – but, after having the same disagreement with Riva, Carl storms out of the kitchen, leaving the sous-chef Tony (Bobby Cannavale) to prepare for Michel the same food that the critic has already rubbished.  Carl reappears at Michel’s table during dessert and bawls him out for his cruelty; one of the other diners captures the exchange on his phone and the clip goes viral online.  Carl quits his job, can’t get another that he would want, and reluctantly accepts an invitation from Inez to go on a trip with her and Percy to Miami, Carl’s home city.  During their visit, Inez’s first ex-husband (Robert Downey Jr) offers to set Carl up with a food truck.  It’s in a dilapidated state but Carl, with the help of Percy, cleans it up.  When Martin (John Leguizamo), a junior cook from the LA restaurant, hears that Carl intends to start selling cubanos (Cuban sandwiches) from the truck, he leaves his job and arrives in Miami to work with his old boss.

    This describes the first half of Chef.  There are signs from an early stage that the material is thin, with too many filler shots of food in preparation that are meant to express mood and feeling – an aphrodisiac pasta that Carl prepares for Molly (Scarlett Johansson), the hostess at Riva, and so on.  After less than an hour, it’s clear the film isn’t going to be about anything except Carl’s comeback as a chef and development as a father.  I couldn’t see how Jon Favreau could keep things going for another hour.  Once Carl’s ‘El Jefe’ food truck starts on the road from Miami back to LA, with several ports of call en route, Chef more or less comes to a halt.  The Cuban-inspired street food is great; Percy is keen and clued up enough to devise sustained online publicity for the food truck; and the journey is a virtually uninterrupted success story, uneventful in terms of incident and with no ups and downs in the relationships between characters.   You know the bonding of father and son is going to be a main feature of this road movie element but I wasn’t prepared for the falling-back-in-love of Carl and his ex-wife or for the revelation that Ramsey Michel is as nice as everyone else – to say the least:  once he’s sampled the food on sale from El Jefe, Michel offers to set up Carl up in a restaurant in Los Angeles and the film ends, some months later, with Carl and Inez’s remarriage taking place in this new restaurant.  (The only thing that prevents the rapprochement between Carl and Inez being completely ridiculous is that you’ve never believed how they got together in the first place.)  Chef ends happily for all concerned except Riva, Tony and Molly, who simply disappear.  It’s because Dustin Hoffman, Bobby Cannavale and Scarlett Johansson are all strong, and you want more of the characters they create, that their absence exposes more fully the weakness of the story.

    Jon Favreau has got together a high-powered cast and supplied them with good naturalistic dialogue that’s often amusing, and which the actors make engaging, but the screenplay is full of holes.  It seems unlikely that a big-name restaurant critic would be on the receiving end of a set three-course menu but that’s what happens to Ramsey Michel on his return visit to Riva’s place – a set menu, that is, of the three dishes he loathed the first time.  The boy Percy (Emjay Anthony gives him a nice blend of sweetness and eccentricity) loves helping on the food truck and Carl thinks his son may be a cook in the making.  Percy wants to carry on working with his father once he goes back to his mother and to school in Los Angeles; in a short-lived downbeat scene near the end of the trip, Carl tells Percy that won’t be possible.  Once they’ve parted company, however, Carl watches the one-second-a-day video diary that his son has made of the El Jefe experience (as if he wouldn’t have watched it when Percy first completed the video) and changes his mind.  He phones and tells (the inexplicably friendless) Percy that he can continue to work at weekends and after school, once his homework’s done – and provided Inez agrees.  She does so instantly.  It’s possible the writer-director-star means to convince the audience of Chef that, with a bit of thought and goodwill, most everyone in the human race can get along fine but I think it’s more likely that the screenplay is lazy and egotistical.  The film has been favourably received and several reviews I’ve read suggest a parallel between Carl’s back-to-basics rebirth and Jon Favreau’s return, from directing things like the first two Iron Man movies, to his indie roots.  In order for this to resonate with the viewer, you obviously need to know who Favreau is.  The fact that I didn’t clearly made a difference but it seems arrogant for a film-maker to rely on this kind of background knowledge to give substance to his work.

    One of the few sequences in Chef with any charge is Carl’s verbal assault on Ramsey Michel – and not just because it briefly threatens to become a physical one.  When Carl yells his outrage that Michel can, with a few, well-chosen vitriolic words, annihilate the chef’s tremendous efforts to design and deliver great food, he’s expressing the creative talent’s frustration and fury with the professional critic in any medium (even if there’s something peculiarly alienating about food critics – they’re consumers in a particularly literal sense and can therefore be seen as spewing their unkind words).   But even this bit of the film is weakened in retrospect – both by Michel’s turning out all right in the end and by the suspicion that Jon Favreau means you to see his own story in Carl Casper’s.    One further whinge:  this is the third American film I’ve seen in the space of a few weeks (after Fruitvale Station and The Fault in Our Stars) to show texts and/or tweets on screen as a narrative device.  This is going to be a stylistic cliché even sooner than I expected.

    16 July 2014

     

  • The Home and the World

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ghare Baire

    Satyajit Ray (1984)

    From the start of his career in cinema Satyajit Ray wanted to adapt Rabindranath Tagore’s novel The Home and the World for the screen.  He eventually did so almost thirty years after Pather Panchali although he suffered two serious heart attacks during shooting and his son Sandip completed the project.   The Home and the World is visually static compared with the Apu films and The Big City.  This may signify Ray’s attainment of a masterly simplicity – Pauline Kael’s laudatory review covers this interestingly – but it also makes the picture, for all its gorgeous colouring, tough to watch.  In the novel Tagore is understood to be arguing with himself about the pros and cons of India’s absorbing or rebelling against Western influences both cultural and commercial, and the implications of Indian women moving from purdah into relative social freedom.  (Female emancipation in Indian society was, of course, one of Ray’s abiding preoccupations.)  The novel is divided into chapters each of which is narrated in the first person by one of the principal characters:  Nikhil, the liberal-minded rajah who believes in social and political advancement through non-violent means and who decides that his wife Bimala should not only have an English education but also emerge from the seclusion of the women’s quarters in his palace; Sandip, his friend and polar opposite in terms of political values, a leader of the Swadeshi movement set up in response to the partition of Bengal (between the Hindu and Muslim communities) by the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, in 1905; and Bimala herself who, at first, has no appetite for seeing men other than her husband but whose life is turned upside down by coming into contact with Sandip and what he represents.

    The first person narrative can be a useful form in which to express political arguments as well as personal feelings but Ray virtually dispenses with it and, when the characters stand or sit articulating their feelings and opinions, the effect is very different.  Political rhetoric comes naturally to Sandip.  Even so, his tendency to expatiate in private as well as from a public platform seems to derive less from the character than from the way that Ray has decided to present the themes of The Home and the World.  They are important and inherently interesting themes but that doesn’t mean that exposure to them is bound to be an absorbing experience:  I struggled to keep awake during some of the monologues.  (The English subtitles to this very wordy film were some of the worst I remember seeing – full of typos, and at one point the titles disappear for around thirty seconds, even though the predominant voice on the soundtrack is speaking in Bengali.)

    The style of The Home and the World puts great pressure on the main actors.  In the case of the two male principals, the events of the story don’t allow them to show many different sides:  their character gives them a place in the scheme and a largely predetermined fate.  And although Bimala does experience radical change we know from her brief introductory voiceover where this has led her to.  That opening speech is nevertheless powerful – words to the effect of:

    ‘I have passed through fire. What was pure in me has been burnt out.  The ashes that are left I have dedicated to him who has received all my sin into the depths of his own divided spirit.’

    Although Bimala could conceivably be talking about either Nikhil or Sandip, you know soon enough that it must be her husband:  Soumitra Chatterjee is charismatic in the role and gets across what dazzles Bimala but, to the viewer, Sandip’s masculine self-confidence and lack of political compromise are transparently selfish.  As the gentle, introverted Nikhil, Victor Banerjee is much more subtly charming and mysterious.  (He occasionally has a look of John Cazale about him here:  the resemblance never occurred to me watching Banerjee as Dr Aziz in A Passage to India, made in the same year – perhaps because he’s not quite as slender in the Lean film as in The Home and the World.)   The intensity of Banerjee and of Swatilekha Chatterjee as Bimala never seems forced – a considerable achievement.  But there’s little in all the rest of the film to match the early, relatively gentle scenes between them and the sequences which describe Bimala’s grudgingly learning the ways of an English lady.  The scene in which Miss Gilby (Jennifer Kendal-Kapoor, in her last film appearance) teaches Bimala a song is breathtaking because of both the loveliness of the two women’s voices and the beguiling cultural confusion.  The song’s lyrics are nostalgic in themselves:  ‘Tell me the tales that to me were so dear/Long, long ago, long, long ago’.   When Bimala sings them to herself later in the film, by which time her life has moved in an unexpected and disorienting direction, the song has an even greater ironic depth and impact.  With Indrapramit Roy as Sandip’s young henchman.

    21 September 2013

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