Bread Show – Weekend
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Food as a symbol of something greater – love and decay, faith and power, creativity, sin, general prosperity or severe social neurosis – has occupied cinema from its very birth, just as philosophy, literature and philosophy used it as a universal metaphor before its appearance. art. But as a source of the simplest emotions accessible to everyone, cinema and food are literally made for each other: where there is a spectacle, there is bread. Now TV shows have reached for food, and everything that is cooked on the stove or consumed at the dinner table gradually fills the entire screen. The film Ragout Doden Buffana, which has just won the Best Director Award at Cannes, takes this trend to the extreme. What is our life? Food!
In one of his letters to Louise Collet, Gustave Flaubert tells the story of his cook, a twenty-five-year-old girl who, as it turned out in the conversation, did not know that Louis Philippe was no longer the king of France, but instead of a monarchy, he had been a republic for five years. “It doesn’t concern me at all and doesn’t interest me,” she replied dismissively to the great writer. “And I also thought of myself as a smart person, but compared to her, I’m just an idiot!” sums up Flaubert without a hint of coquetry.
The epicurean and writer of multi-page odes to gastronomic joy, Marcel Ruff, in the 1924 novel The Life and Passion of Daudin Buffan, Gourmet, brings to the stage, consisting of a kitchen and dining room, characters little different from Flaubert’s cook. Both Dodin and his muse Eugenie, who daily conjure at the stove, do not care at all about what happens behind the walls of their castle. Both time and space are huddled in queues, in endless waiting, sometimes turning their noses in annoyance: the aroma of delicious dishes floats in the air, but they are not invited to the table until the very end.
Chan An Hung, who took on the film adaptation of this blatantly eventless novel, from the first frames makes the viewer understand that true pleasure requires sacrifice, first of all, we will have to abandon the usual worldview table of ranks. The path to Dodin Bouffan’s Stew lies through the stomach: only by agreeing with the heroes that cooking is the most important of the arts, and the geniuses who succeeded in it, whose names are mentioned at the meal – Antoine Karem, Auguste Escoffier or Jean-Brilat Savarin – are not inferior Mozart, Petrarch or Raphael, we will be able to approach a state of mind in which the meaning of life is equal to the taste for it. And what’s more, it’s just equal to taste.
“Dauden Buffan’s Stew” opens with a meditative half-hour sketch: at dawn, in the gentle rays of the morning sun, Eugenie (Juliette Binoche) examines the garden with the utmost seriousness, picks its ripest gifts, and then goes to the kitchen, where oysters are already languishing on ice, scallops and flounder, lamb and guinea fowl marinated in herbs, ice cream for a Norwegian omelet is frozen, the most complex sauce of forty-nine ingredients is infused, cheeses are fragrant. While the owner of the castle, in the amazing performance of Benoit Magimel, is making his toilet, Eugenie gets to work – for dinner they are waiting for the company of the same devoted gourmets, for whom a matter of taste is a matter of honor. Do not think about the essentials from above – the motto that Doden and his friends, the Burgundian nobility, could easily trace after the author of the “Physiology of Taste” Savarin and above the front door, and on a personal ring, and on a marble tombstone. They are obsessed with the desire to swap poetry with prose, they are ready to travel a hundred leagues in order to taste excellent quails and not miss a fraction of the emotions contained in this food of the gods, so they start the meal, covering their heads with a thick towel: this is not only a taste, but and the smell will not escape their highly sensitive receptors.
Food as the most accessible of pleasures, as a symbol of comfort and peace in the absence of happiness and will, has recently become a topic for cinematic conversation more than once or twice. But almost always, behind the popularization of a particularly reverent attitude to what is first prepared and then served, there was a primitive pop concept, best articulated by the writer Elizabeth Gilbert in the best-selling book Eat, Pray, Love. Admiration for the traditions of the Neapolitan pizzaiolo, shining in the eyes of the grown-up Julia Roberts, called on the public to accept themselves, to humble themselves before the storms of a world far from the ideal, before personal adversity and trauma. Surrender to the carnivorous impulse without looking back at the mantras of nutritionists or environmentalists, live your best, love every day and the gifts that it brings you. Be one with the Universe, striking in its colorful diversity and harmonious uniformity, breathe deeply in unison with the beating of the universe. Lasse Hallström campaigned in the same vein with the sugary “Chocolate”, drawing a parallel between a hot dessert and warmth of the soul. Or Nora Efron in the modern version of “Domostroy” – “Julie and Julia”.
Kitchen therapy in the movies was opposed by another trend that treated food idolatry in an ironic way, but at the same time agreed that if the winds were blowing too hard, nothing could be invented better than a sizzling omelette or a glass of Bordeaux with a tear. The mystery of haute cuisine has been willingly filmed for the past twenty years – both for the big and small screens: here are the personal chefs of the French presidents, and the legendary chefs of the “Sun King”, and psychopathic chefs frustrated by the laws of the capitalist market, not to mention Hannibal Lecter , the aesthetic par excellence. Foodies of all countries, unite in cinemas! But none of the directors who took on this modest and at the same time modest topic, before Chan Anh Hung, dared to raise food from signifiers to signifieds, make it an absolute value, not consider it as a kind of text, give it the screen without a trace, without exchanging it for social metaphors. or postmodern exercises. No one, except for the students of Rubens – Snyders and Jordaens – had previously embarked on a traveling journey through still lifes of meat loin or marine reptiles, striking the imagination with its monumentality. How important it is to be serious when carving game or soaking morels, not to imagine the era of post-truth or post mortem, in which artificial intelligence is able to create an ersatz for any creation of nature, from Flaubert to potofé, and instantly. And in this sense, “Dauden Buffan” is a nostalgic journey along the jelly banks and milky rivers of France, which, however, existed only in our imagination, the lost paradise of professional romantics – oh, if only we could return to where there are no other sorrows, except for the escaped sauce and stale wine.
Of course, in Doden Buffan, love for what we eat is equal in rights with love for who we eat with, but, most importantly, in this “animated picture” no one eats each other. Where are the “Big Grub” and “The Great Restaurant” to “Dauden Buffan” – the great story of great love for a woman by a man who proposes a hand and heart, despite the fact that marriage violates the logic of serving dishes sacred to him. After all, marriage is a dinner at which hot dessert serves as a cold appetizer, and champagne from a sunken ship is the only drink: Krug, vintage 1873.
Perhaps this fact explains the deafening devastating reviews of the French press, offended that the national mentality and native culture are reduced to frontal bon vivantism: living well, and living well (read: eat) is even better. In Russian culture, more accustomed to selfless suffering, “Daudin Buffan” also runs the risk of appearing sacrilegious, or at least an ambiguous joke, like the one that Madame de Gaulle released immediately after the unsuccessful attempt on her husband at Petit Clamart. Are the chickens safe? she asked her husband. “Chickens” in France are called police officers, of course, who accompanied the cortege, but natural marinated chicken in jars were packed by Madame de Gaulle in the trunk of a presidential Citroen. This revealing story about the French way of life (and death) of Chang Anhung was just recalled by critics. Chicken or egg, matter or spirit, is not the essence. The fundamental question of Doden Buffan sounds different. “Who am I to you – a cook or a wife?” asks Eugenie Dodin. A matter of taste, the only category that currently allows you to save honor and reason.
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