Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros
Frederick Wiseman, the 93 year old master documentarian has been called a filmmaker who shows how an army base, mental hospital, domestic violence shelter or small Maine town or a Queens neighborhood or New York Public Library branch works and changes over time. And that is certainly one of his main subjects.
But there are so many other reasons to treasure Wiseman and none bigger than the simplicity and purity of the filmmaking itself. The very best documentaries don’t just explain something or tell a story, they capture moments in life and some elusive truth about living that hadn’t necessarily been named before. They help you see things anew and understand things you never thought about (or took for granted).
And they’re often shrewd about showing the nuts-and-bolts process of creating something, whether it’s being demonstrated by artists (as in a number of French documentaries in which we watch dance companies rehearse) or the workers/citizens in other documentaries trying to serve their clients/their community/get through the year and into the next one.
All of these gifts perhaps “wisdoms” would be closer to what they are are on display in Menus Plaisirs Les Troisgros, Wiseman’s film about a restaurant in France; it may be one of his simplest films but it’s also among his richest. It’s one of the great movies about food and cooking, on a level with Big Nightand Tampopo; an equally great “process” movie that lets us behind the scenes at a fine dining establishment from its earliest purchases of produce. meat, fish through preparation/ plating/service; a family/businesses movie (the Troisgros have run this place for nearly six decades), and, with greater subtlety but no less impact, it’s also very much about what it means to look really look at a thing, and appreciate it for what it is, whether that thing is a bunch of carrots or radishes in a produce market stall, a flowering shrub in a field, a herd of cows grazing, a mass of bees in a hive, or configurations of employees and supervisors moving delicately around one another in a restaurant kitchen.
The main location of the film is a three Michelin starred restaurant called The Forest Without Leaves. For many years, this restaurant was located in an urban setting across the street from a train station in Roanne but it moved to a manoir in nearby Ouches and took on a more “country” feel in 2017. The place is owned by the Troisgros family, which has two other restaurants in town.
Michel runs the place now, but his son César is next in line. (There’s also another son, Léo, who’s a chef at another restaurant, he seems annoyed when his father suddenly changes the sauce for a dish that Léo’s been perfecting for three weeks.) It takes some time to realize that César and Michel are related, they interact mainly as boss and employee (though very amiably and with mutual respect).
This being a Wiseman joint, there are no talking head interviews or identifying chyrons or titles telling you everyone’s name and position; nor is there any voiceover narration indeed, none of the usual devices you now expect to see in all documentaries of every subject or style. (Wiseman does find one weird little workaround to his “no narration” rule. He’ll often have one subject ask another person to verbally explain an idea or process, then watch and listen.)
Every so often, an employee or customer will say someone’s name not often. Wiseman loves finding ways to get us to know people solely through what they say and do, as well as their relationship both to the spaces they move through/work or live in, and by extension their relationship to the world at large. There are mini-montages between scenes sequences in this film too, often these consist of tight closeups and wide shots that hang onscreen long enough for us ponder their texture/color/content. There’s movement in the cutting, often conveyed by choosing a series of shots where people move laterally across the screen in the same direction.
But for the most part, Menus Plaisirs finds Wiseman and his usual cinematographer James Bishop finding a good spot to observe two or three or many more people doing a thing, and parking the camera there. The results are moments rich enough that they feel like a short film unto themselves. There’s an explanation to a couple of diners about the use of sulfite in winemaking. There’s also a cheesemaker giving restaurant employees a tour of his factory and explaining various processes of ripening (“Each cheese has its moment of truth, and that’s when you sell it”). A farmer tells Michel about lactation cycles in goats and how it relates to his business. There’s also honey being extracted from a beehive.
Something in the way that Wiseman shoots, cuts, positions these moments encourages us to draw connections between them and other parts of the film (as with that beehive scene, which might make you think back on those wide shots of the kitchen with all those “worker bees” moving around each other as they work together). But again this is inference too.
Wiseman never gives you anything, never grabs your neck and says, “Now look here.” That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with making a movie that way not at all! only that Wiseman doesn’t do it, and that refusal is part of what makes his films great.
Another is the often colossal run time of Wiseman’s films. You just have to give in. A scene will last as long as the movie thinks it needs to. It’s not looking at the clock, neither should you be. But if you stay awake through scenes that seem like they might be running a tad long, you may notice that part of the tactic is letting you watch a more concentrated, momentary kind of evolution: how a conversation or other exchange starts out one way and winds up somewhere else.
For instance. There’s a long scene two-thirds of the way through where Michel eats a dish César has prepared, and they talk about what Michel thinks it lacks an element of visual appeal, not taste. He appreciates that there are “no hangers-on softening the taste of the sauce” and calls it “very nice,” then adds, “but to look at?” Much of the restaurant’s reputation rests on its brilliance with presentation. Every dish is plated like a painting in a circular frame; every element on the plate is compositionally and color-balanced but never in such a way as fights or undermines flavor or texture. You can feel César bristling at these notes slightly, then giving in. Whether because he sees father was correct or because dad’s boss remains for us.
At one point Michel says of the restaurant that “it’s always in movement.” He means both the menu and the place itself; we can extend this thought to include everyone who works there and everything involved in making art (which Wiseman believes food can be, though by nature as ephemeral as theater which he also does). You create a thing of beauty, then destroy it as it is consumed. The cycles of destruction and creation are daily bread in restaurants. This movie made me understand why people take pictures of their food. They want a record of the beautiful object that’s about to go away.
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