The Guardian Weekly

A history of food on film

Does cinema have a grudge against haute cuisine? The Menu and Triangle of Sadness follow a lineage of movies expressing unease

By Charles Bramesco

The elaborately prepared feast at uberexclusive restaurant Hawthorne, the setting of new gourmand-culture thriller The Menu, is so photogenic that snapping pictures is forbidden; food in general, however, doesn’t come off looking so good.

The dishes whipped up by self-serious celebrity chef Julian (Ralph Fiennes) and his fleet of obedient kitchen staff aspire to profundity. As foodie douche Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) mansplains to his unimpressed date Margot (Anya TaylorJoy), the sequencing of courses tells a story, elevating foodstuffs to an artistic medium. She’s mostly just hungry, and so she’s disappointed when each plate bears a couple of bites’ worth of what she can only assume is edible material.

A couple of tables over, a catty food critic and her editor concur that one culinary creation has been “tweezed to fuck”, a handy encapsulation of the film’s take on haute cuisine as fussy and overly mannered. As the moral fissures in the evening’s collection of one-percenters open up to reveal their deplorable depths, the grub turns into a marker of their personality defects.

Director Mark Mylod and writers Seth Reiss and Will Tracy resort to some cheap shots in their takedown of gustatory pretension, but they’re working from a dog-eared recipe. The movies have long cultivated a distrustful relationship to the concept of fancy food, using upscale dining as a shorthand for the sanitised savagery of the bourgeoisie. It’s made out to be a big con, a hustle in which poseur saps pay through the nose for small quantities of sustenance. Going solely by received cinematic wisdom, one would have no idea that people splurging for an expensive night out do sometimes get what they pay for, and that appreciating the occasional dollop of miso foam doesn’t have to be a reflection on character.

Cinema’s fraught relationship to its own dietary habits starts with human civilisation’s equally problematic understanding of fatness. Since the days when only nobility could afford the groceries required to pack on a few pounds, obesity has been treated as synonymous with excess and greed. An unforgettable scene from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life joins the rotund Mr Creosote for his customary binge

of caviar, mussels and foie gras, which he then projectile vomits on to his server in a visceral metaphor for the tendency of the rich to take, take, take and leave labourers with their mess. This was repeated recently in Triangle of Sadness, which also doused itself in a tidal wave of puke to make plain the grotesquerie of the mega-wealthy.

Counterexamples, films like Tampopo or Babette’s Feast, share a focus on the making and serving over the gobbling. Part of the contempt for fine dining and its patrons comes from the estrangement between the grisly work and elegant rewards of cooking, an analogy for the way capitalists do their worst without getting their own hands dirty.

As of late, cannibalism has been more often portrayed as a shadow to the eater’s refined sensibility. The human body is plated with prestige on TV’s Hannibal, in 2017’s indie A Feast of Man, and at the finale of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, in all cases to expose the barbarism underlying the false sophistication of the moneyed class. The recurring association between haute cuisine and deformity of the soul is curious if only for its lack of equivalents in other luxuries.

This past summer, Peter Strickland’s wonderfully bizarre Flux Gourmet had its critical cake and ate it too. He imagined an insular world wherein food and art can be one and the same, as experimental musical groups use produce and burbling stews to create haunting aural compositions. He shares the common resentment for the donor class required to fund creative endeavours and a scepticism to artists high on their own ego, but he also reserves a deep affection for the eccentrics crushing cabbages and bashing beets. He’s one of them, after all, that kinship the secret sauce tying his exotic screen delicacy together. It helps to love something if you’re going to make fun of it. Anything else seems like sour grapes.

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2022-12-02T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-12-02T08:00:00.0000000Z

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