Le Chef (Comme un chef)

In France, chef = cool.

(2012) Comedy (Cohen Media Group) Jean Reno, Michael Youn, Raphaelle Agogue, Julien Boisselier, Salome Stevenin, Serge Lariviere, Issa Doumbia, Bun-hay Mean, Pierre Vernier, Santiago Segura, Genevieve Casile, Andre Penvern, Rebecca Miquel, James Gerard, Henri Payet, Franck de la Personne, Celine Caussimon, Jeanne Ferron. Directed by Daniel Cohen

Sacre Cordon Bleu!! If there is one thing the French love more than….well, love, it’s cuisine. Those Michelin stars are a really big deal in France.

Just ask Alexandre Lagarde (Reno). He has parlayed his three star status into a lucrative career with several restaurants, a television show and a frozen food line to his name. However, life isn’t rosy for him; he’s lost his fire and inspiration. His restaurants are owned by a corporate mogul whose snarky son Stanislas (Boisselier) would like nothing more than to see Alexandre, whom he considers old-fashioned and out-dated, retired to the Gulag of the French countryside and his golden boy Cyril Boss (Gerard), a devotee of molecular gastronomy, installed in the flagship restaurant Cargo Lagarde. Alexandre of course is livid about this; how humiliating it would be to be forced out of the restaurant that he built and bears his name.

The guidebook reviewers will soon be checking out Alexandre’s spring menu and both Stanislas and Cyril are confident that the more modern-thinking guidebook critics will strip Alexandre of at least one of his stars which would contractually allow Stanislas to fire Alexandre from his own restaurant. The great chef’s troubles are also extending to his home life; his daughter Amandine (Stevenin) is getting ready to deliver her thesis on Russian literature, a subject Alexandre cares about as much about as he cares about the spring menu at McDonald’s. Things are tense with Amandine who resents her father for caring more about his restaurant than he does about her.

Jacky Bonnot (Youn) doesn’t have any Michelin stars yet but he is sure he deserves at least a few. He’s got tremendous talent and a flair for vegetables; they whisper to him. Unfortunately, he’s insufferably mule-headed and arrogant, never a good combination in the kitchen, and is fired from job after job. This exasperates his pregnant girlfriend Beatrice (Agogue) who moves back in with her parents who encourage her to get back together with Jacky because he’s such a good chef. Realizing that she’s serious, he gets whatever job he can, in this case painting the exterior of an old folks home.

Through a fairly serendipitous set of circumstances, Jacky catches the eye of Alexandre who gives him an unpaid internship at Cargo Lagarde. Jacky’s talents get him the position Alexandre’s right hand in the kitchen and his prickly personality and stubborn refusal to compromise earn him the enmity of the other chefs. Jacky at last has his shot but is it on a sinking ship? And will Jacky torpedo his own chances at achieving his dreams?

It’s hard to find comedies like this these days as it seems that most Hollywood comedies rely on star comedians (i.e. Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Melissa McCarthy), all-out raunch, going big on outrage or just throwing as many jokes at the screen as possible and seeing what sticks. Le Chef tells its story honestly and while the plot may not be anything extraordinary it is told well and manages to make us laugh along the way at fairly regular intervals.

Reno is intensely likable even when his character is being a bit of a jerk. Reno is one of the most versatile actors in the world, being equally comfortable in action films, dramas and comedies and adept in all three. His presence is welcome in any film whether it’s made in Hollywood or France and he’s one of those actors that will motivate me to go see whatever movie he’s in even if it is in a supporting role.

Youn is a well-known comedian in France and while I’m not personally familiar with his work, I’m told that his performance here is fairly typical for him. His Jacky has a fine dining soul in a fast food world and therein much of the comedy of the movie’s first third arises. Jacky is a prickly bastard but you still end up rooting for him despite his arrogance and stubbornness. Hey, nobody’s perfect, right?

The film utilizes some really clever moments nicely and while it occasionally descends into low comedy unnecessarily by the film’s end I was more than satisfied. Comedies are difficult to pull off properly and rarely make the kind of splash at festivals that dramas do but this was one of the better narrative features at this year’s festival and a welcome relief from the angst of the dramatic features.

REASONS TO GO: Reno is incredibly likable. Funny where it needs to be. Will give you a hankering for French food.

REASONS TO STAY: Descends into silliness occasionally.  

FAMILY VALUES:  Some foul language.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The film debuted at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival.

CRITICAL MASS: As of 4/13/14: Rotten Tomatoes: 75% positive reviews. Metacritic: no score yet.

COMPARISON SHOPPING: Ratatouille

FINAL RATING: 8/10

NEXT: Last I Heard

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Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Julianne Nicholson discovers that if you get a few glasses of wine in him, Timothy Hutton will begin to loosen up with the Ordinary People stories.

(2009) Comedy (IFC) Julianne Nicholson, Will Forte, Timothy Hutton, Dominic Cooper, Bobby Cannavale, John Krasinski, Christopher Meloni, Denis O’Hare, Max Minghella, Lou Taylor Pucci, Josh Charles, Frankie Faison. Directed by John Krasinski

What do men really want? Why, any woman knows the answer to that – it’s sex and lots of it, in some cases the kind most humiliating and degrading to the woman possible. But how accurate is that portrayal?

Apparently right down to the bone, according to this adaptation of a collection of short stories by the late David Foster Wallace of the same name. In those stories, the questions are asked by an anonymous interviewer just denoted by a Q and a colon. Here, a character is created to be the interviewer; Sara Quinn (Nicholson), a low-key cropped-haired gamine who sits down a group of men in front of a pitcher of water and a tape recorder and asks them a variety of questions. These interviewees are rarely given names, only numbers. They rarely have anything nice to say. She does all this for a post-graduate thesis for pompous Professor Adams (Hutton).

Not everything here is a formal interview. Some of the vignettes are snippets of overheard conversations, or Adams pontificating on whatever. The last is Sara’s ex-boyfriend Ryan (Krasinski) who had dumped her without explanation, leading her to this graduate project. When she at last gets to question him as to why he would hurt her in that way, the answers are far less than forthcoming and far more than humiliating.

Krasinski, better known as Jim in “The Office,” chose a very difficult first project for himself and to his credit doesn’t become lost in it, although the movie does meander a little bit in the final third. Still, he has an excellent sense for casting as the impressive cast often delivers spot-on performances. Along with Hutton, Faison plays the son of a washroom attendant who worked a demeaning job for decades in a hotel he wouldn’t be allowed o stay in. He narrates his story with a mixture of disappointment, shame, and respect. Meloni (from “Law and Order: SVU”) and O’Hare discuss a rather tragic event while waiting in a train station and both are as good as anyone else in the movie, particularly Meloni who is both caustic and sympathetic at once.

The movie has been criticized for lack of a unifying thread but I disagree with that assessment. I do think all the stories are related in more than just a general way; they have to do with the self-image of men and their insecurities that lead them to treat women so poorly. While at times this seems to be a rant against the male species in general, I chose to take it as simply the viewpoint of those who are mystified by the cruelty and arrogance of men and who have yet to find men with better qualities, at least in men that are available to them.

My problem with the movie is that while Nicholson is usually a fine actress, here she is emotionally cut off, so wounded is she from being dumped by a boyfriend that she is frankly well rid of. She kind of floats in and out of the movie, carrying absolutely no inertia which in turn gives the movie a strangely languid quality that I found somewhat unpleasant.

However, Krasinski chose to retain much of Wallace’s terrific dialogue in the movie, utilizing the novelist’s style as much as possible when he couldn’t quote directly. It is one of the movie’s best qualities, and given the fine actors who he recruited to recite that dialogue, makes for a movie that stimulates the mind as much as the libido.

I’m not sure you’ll get any further insight into men by watching this, but you might get a few explanations about our behavior here and there. It is an oversimplification to say that men are all about sex; that aspect is more of a symptom than the disease. However, that men are capable of wanton cruelty is certainly not a surprise. What is surprising is that neither Wallace nor Krasinski could find anything or anyone redeeming in the gender to act as a counterbalance.

WHY RENT THIS: Some of the vignettes particularly that between Meloni and O’Hare and a late monologue by Faison are brilliant. The dialogue is well-written and the impressive cast delivers in most cases.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: Sometimes the movie feels a little aimless. Nicholson is bland and too expressionless.

FAMILY VALUES: There’s a surfeit of sexual innuendo and conversation as well as some foul language of the non-sexual sort. The overall theme and situations are not for children in the least.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: In Professor Adams’s office there is a pile of books, the top one of which is David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” Wallace also wrote the book this is based on.

NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: None listed.

BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $33,745 on an unreported budget; the theatrical release lost money.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

TOMORROW: Bonneville