I wasn’t expecting to like this. Knowing how badly my palette rejected the textures of Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, seeing him produce more satire didn’t exactly put my stomach at ease. But I am nothing if not open to new flavour combinations and experiences, so I tucked in with this one, and I have to admit, I quite like what I was served. “I wonder if constantly comparing films to food will ever get annoying to readers?”, said no critic ever, apparently.
This is as much a critique of the world of haute cuisine as it is of the ways in which the people engage with it, whether it’s through being in the restaurants themselves or experiencing them through some kind of proxy, be it a critic’s opinion of it or it being filmed for television. David Gelb, creator of the Netflix series Chef’s Table, does the second unit work here and he brings a lot of familiar techniques to the production, right down to the way each course in the titular Menu is presented, complete with ingredient list. Said courses, recreated from the Michelin star menu of Dominique Crenn’s Atelier Crenn in San Francisco, are as enticing to look at as they are ridiculously ostentatious, especially when hearing the servers and guests describe them.
Much like with Flux Gourmet, another film about turning what we digest into some form of sophisticated art, part of me feels targeted specifically by what’s being said here. I mean, I’ve made it my lot in life to wax poetic about the nature of art and the ways it can affect an audience; seeing a server describe a wine as having notes of longing and regret felt like something I might’ve written unironically at one point. But also like with Flux Gourmet, the art in question (the food) is shown in its entire context, both for its ridiculous excess and for the genuine creativity that went into its creation. A fair amount of the food is based in molecular gastronomy, which is basically where mad science is brought into cooking with all its gels and foams and intricately conceptualised construction, and the script by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy makes a point of giving it its due credit.
What is being targeted ends up being two-fold: The chef, and the customer. On the chef’s part, Fiennes plays the role with a lot of Gordon Ramsay energy, right down to actually calling a customer "donkey" at one point, but with an added dash of Hannibal Lector darkness to bring out his self-admitted monstrousness. He runs his kitchen like a charismatic cult leader, asking for and getting absolute devotion from his staff, and every evening’s worth of food is served like clockwork. Like a ritual. But in turning what he considers his art into something so routine, so mundane, there’s no joy in it for him anymore. Which kinda defeats the purpose of this whole endeavour, since high cuisine is meant to elevate the simple act of consuming food out of necessity into something of true enjoyment; an experience worth remembering beyond digestion. And where’s the joy in something that has become so soulless?
To that end, we have the customers… and it’s here where the satire gets really juicy. There’s a lot of class warfare by way of food going on here, from Reed Birney and Judith Light as a couple who eat at Hawthorne so regularly that there’s no sense of occasion to it, Arturo Castro, Rob Yang, and Mark St. Cyr as three tech bros who are connected to the cold financial side of high cuisine as a business, John Leguizamo as a washed-up actor… I mean he’s playing a washed-up actor, who is basically there as part of a bid to bullshit his way into a TV show, Janet McTeer as a food critic, and then there’s Nicholas Hoult as the resident foodie and fanboy of chef Slowik. Hoult’s Tyler is basically the worst aspects of the pretentious art critic combined with the worst aspects of the ‘consoomer’. Only caring about his own gratification, which largely comes out of fart-sniffing pontification rather than actually appreciating the food in question, while also showing rather sociopathic disregard for the how and why of its creation and the environment it comes from. It’s only about the experience, not what it took to make it a reality. Never before has it been easier to sympathise with Anya Taylor-Joy, who shows up here as Tyler’s date.
And in the midst of all that, the film takes a pretty hard stance against that sort of culinary exclusivity, where everything is designed solely for those who care more about their image than their intake, and are also so well-off that they don’t need to consider just how much they’re spending on food they don’t even care about. It links up with a lot of what I liked about Steven Knight’s Burnt and even the ending of Spencer in how it shows that, yes, making food at this tier is its own artform, but you can get even greater rewards by giving people something simple and even cheap that they will actually appreciate. It’s the same mentality behind my own approach to cinema as art, which is why I really don't like the elitist condescension that regularly gets thrown at mainstream popcorn cinema and superhero flicks especially, and it’s part of the reason why I hold people like Steven Soderbergh in such high regard: Art shouldn’t be reserved just for the super-rich and privileged.
As a darkly comedic thriller with veins of horror aesthetic in how it shows self-realisation through gruesome and subversive means, it works very nicely and benefits from strong casting and solid visuals. Anya Taylor-Joy and Ralph Fiennes work amazingly well together, as do Taylor-Joy and Hoult. But as a treatise on the importance of the creators and the servers in the process of exhibiting art, whatever form that art may take, a lot of what it says is quite accurate and delivered at just the right tone so that its inherent silliness is able to rest comfortably alongside the darker moments and even the emotional parts. It’s a nice reminder not to let the stiffness of routine get in the way of entertainment, whether you’re providing it or engaging with it. Remember to tip your servers.
