Hitchcock in the Kitchen – Weekend
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The BBC has released a mini-series sequel to the film Boiling Point about a chef in despair – a real kitchen thriller with Hitchcockian suspense.
In 2022, actor and masterful director Philip Barantini released a culinary thriller about the misadventures of chef Andy Jones (Stephen Graham), expanding his short film into a full-length film. This one-and-a-half-hour full-length film was shot in one take. The camera accompanied Andy on the way to the restaurant, we heard how he made excuses on the phone to his ex that he didn’t call his son because he was terribly busy – and it soon became clear that rush jobs were his way of life. At the restaurant, the camera left Andy and stuck to someone else—like Carly (Vinette Robinson) as she heroically covered his ass. The camera followed the waiters, studying the customers, among whom were unpleasant ones, like the famous chef Alastair Skye (Jason Flemyng) – he came into the restaurant to bait Andy and demand back the borrowed money, and also brought a culinary critic on his tail.
In fact, the film was shot over two days, and the continuity of the action was ensured by shooting not just one shot, but at least four. But the editing cuts were not visible, and then the viewer was drawn into the funnel of what was happening so that he completely ceased to notice the manner of filming. Hitchcock used the same technique in the classic “Rope” (1948): he wanted to drive the viewer into an eerie performance lasting one evening and stitched the film together from 10 long takes. Barantini talks about the moral dilemmas that confront Andy and the others and don’t allow them to breathe. The camera pursuing them is a kind of gaze from God, about which we think that he does not exist, but for some reason we always count on him at a critical moment. And the work of Barantini’s fashionable London restaurant at Christmas consists entirely of critical moments – the characters have been making all this dregs for years, so that one day it will fall on them in all its variety, like from a bursting bag of gifts. At the end of a frantic race that lasted one evening (the health inspector downgrades the restaurant’s rating to three, one of the visitors is taken away in an ambulance), Andy, having snorted cocaine and washed it down with alcohol, fell dead, like a runner at the finish line, struck by a heart attack.
But he did not die, as we learn from the new series – he only lost his restaurant, his family and his career. Instead, the ambitious and talented Carly becomes the main character. She doesn’t drink, she doesn’t date men (she seems to prefer girls, but that’s not accurate), but she also has her own Achilles heel – an elderly, manipulative mother who hates Carly’s job and her lifestyle and disrupts her from work by pressing the phone panic button. The moment is critical again, because instead of rushing home, Carly had to explain to investors what the feature of “northern cuisine” is at her Point North restaurant. Do you know what kind of northern cuisine this is? So investors don’t know. And they don’t give you money! And everything else starts all over again: soushef throws a bottle of sauce at the appetizer cook and leaves, slamming the door; an apprentice pastry chef locks himself in the toilet to commit suicide because of unsuccessful cakes (they are successful!); a newcomer accepted into the team does nothing he doesn’t know how, and the head of the baking department puts it to the bottle after 13 years of sobriety. Problems attack each and every character, like the aggressive birds of Tippi Hedren’s character in the film The Birds. But in general, all this looks like ordinary life, only put on fast forward with an increased density of events – the eye of God will still discern who messed up where. “Boiling Point” is similar to the recent series “Bear” — all kitchens have the same problems.
The series has the same cinematographer as the film, Matthew Lewis, but now he is not tasked with condensing the action into one shot and one evening, rather emphasizing that all evenings are equally fateful. To understand what else the film, pulsating with tension, and the series that follows it, are made of, let’s quickly repeat the material once again – and again we’ll run into Hitchcock. His suspense is when the viewer sees a time bomb under the table, but the hero does not see it. In the film, the main bomb was a restaurant guest with allergies, and we waited to see if the talented but careless chefs would poison her with nuts. There are several of these bombs in the series – money (will they give it or not?), alcoholism (will they lose their temper and drink?), and also a bunch of offended egos, unfulfilled ambitions and other explosive feelings. The theme of the kitchen is in vogue these days, but that’s not the point—this kind of Hitchcock happens to everyone from time to time.
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