2023-12-22 23:41:25
The kitchen is fashionable. You just have to go to Instagram or TikTok, where recipes, visits to restaurants and food critics multiply endlessly. Then there is television, where the umpteenth edition of Masterchef, Masterchef Celebrity or Masterchef Junior roams freely on the public channel showing that, in the society of entertainment, cooking is competition and popularity. Chefs are stars, famous people who appear in magazines and even make waves. Are celebrities. People go to their restaurants to see them and take a selfie, not to be fed.
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Cooking is political, and the triumph of neoliberalism is manifested in gastronomy, and that becomes much clearer when you see To simmer, the French film chosen to represent its country at the Oscars and which has made the first cut alongside The Snow Society. It is directed by the filmmaker of Vietnamese origin Tran Anh Hung, who amazed everyone with The smell of green papaya and here he tells the story of a cook and a gourmet for whom she works. The year is 1885, and the kitchen was a negotiation weapon. The geopolitics of the world were decided around a table. And while cooking one fell in love.
The film is an exercise in staging that provokes the senses. By sight and hearing, of course, but almost by smell and taste with the delicacy with which the director portrays the creative process of each dish. “For me, cinema is the art of incarnation, and I like that it is not only on an intellectual or spiritual level, but that it has to be a physical experience,” says Tran Anh Hung, who remembers the origin of his gastronomic passion in Vietnam. , and how his parents, workers, sat around the dishes that his mother made “in a very simple but wonderful way.” “My love for art really comes from the beauty of the dishes she cooked,” she says.
To simmer vindicates artisan work, that which is done with the hands, and cooking as art and not as a spectacle, something that Tran Anh Hung is clear about: “Cooking is an art. The difference between something that is art and what is artisanal is that art allows you to do infinite things, which are not limited by laws and regulations and I believe that culinary art is like that. It is the art of mixing spices, of giving importance to one aroma more than another. It’s about creating the personality of a great chef, and that space for creation is limitless, and that’s why it’s an art.”
Therefore, if all art is political, cooking is also political, something that is shown in the film and that the director clearly emphasizes. “Of course cooking is political. Napoleon understood it well. He didn’t like to eat. It’s like Bergman, who could eat a single dish and had enough. Napoléon did not like to eat but he understood the importance of food in the diplomatic world. He gave a castle to every great chef and negotiated the fate of the world around the table, because things are talked more calmly with a wine. And that is political, but that is not the only reason food is political. The big problem with food is bad food, which is also food for the masses, and that creates more injustice and inequality between the rich and the poor,” he emphasizes.
Of course cooking is political. Napoleon understood it well. He didn’t like to eat, but he understood the importance of food in the diplomatic world.
Tran Anh Hung — Cinemasta
For the morbid, the protagonist couple of To simmer, that chef and that gourmet who live their passion between the stove and recipes are Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel, two of the best French performers and former couple who were married and had two children before separating. They haven’t had the best relationship, but Tran Anh Hung decided to let them bring their characters to life. They accepted. Now, the director admits that his choice made him “scared”: “They were separated and have not had a good relationship, but they are professionals and their talent is what makes it possible to create this feeling of love that is seen on screen, but it wasn’t easy. “They are great actors, but at first I was worried.”
Normally food in movies is not paid attention. It appears in the shot, in the background, but it is never a narrative element. Here it is. A fundamental one, and the director had to think and rethink how to show it, how his staging should capture the majesty of what was being cooked. His reference was not cinematic. “I wanted it to be like a ballet, for there to be a cinematic impulse and for it to be physical. When you go to see a ballet that’s what you see. Your brain doesn’t stop moving with people dancing and I wanted that to happen here. For this we need complex preparation and filming,” he explains.
Tran Anh Hung, who won the Best Director award at Cannes with this film, will be one of Juan Antonio Bayona’s rivals for the Oscar for Best International Film. Her election by the French Academy committee was very controversial, since she was chosen ahead of the great favorite, Anatomy of a fall, winner of the Palme d’Or and present in all the pools for the most important categories in the next Oscars. The producers of Anatomy of a fall They showed their anger at the election of To simmer, something that for the director is “a shame.”
“The producers of Anatomy of a fall They have said things that have caused this controversy and I think it is a shame. It has been like in Cannes, a committee decides which film goes to the Oscars or which film wins the Palme d’Or, and no one protested with their Palme d’Or, why has it happened with the choice of the film that goes to the Oscars? ? Luckily he caught me in Vietnam, preparing an exhibition and I was very far away from all this.” Perhaps the game has turned out well for them, and there are finally two French films present in the nominations showing the good moment of their industry, which is returning strongly after the pandemic.
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