Menus Plaisirs – <PERSON>
it is interesting to watch <PERSON> touch on this sort of thing, having only his earliest work for additional context. in something like hospital or high school, there exists a preconceived social ethos through which you are meant to process the images you're given. the subjects of those films are Essential Social Structures - institutions of the medicinal and the educational, respectively. you are presented with a plethora of issues that these structures carry, and these issues have weight only because you have an innate understanding of how necessary the pertinent structures are to basic welfare. 794
the issues must be solved because the structures must survive.
however, in wiseman's latest effort, menus plaisirs – les troisgros, the subject is a three-michelin star restaurant — hardly a social necessity. there is no great contemporary urgency, no need to take action; rather, it is mostly just four hours of epicurean pornography (though not without its own ethos-of-sorts), and it is also mostly delightful. it is an occasionally rather academic movie, but what wiseman is most interested in is not the food or the patrons or the culture but the labor of love at the heart of the process; the passion, the artistry! but also, the bureaucracy-de-cuisine, the ineffectual arguing, the decadent banality of precision-plating, i could go on..
there is a moment where one of the gourmand clients tells <PERSON> that he saw his son someplace; strictly in passing. <PERSON> responds by launching into a fifteen-minute conversation (it is more of a monologue) about his family, the restaurant's history, and everything else he can think of. the whole time, he has this huge, shit-eating grin on his face, and to me, that is the essence of this movie: delirious pleasure in doing what you love, even if the thing you love is frivolous and ridiculous and only you really care about it 794