MENUS-PLAISIRS - LES TROISGROS ***1/2
Frederick Wiseman2023
IDEA: A look inside the Michelin three-starred Troisgros restaurant in Ouches, France and its culinary legacy.
BLURB: Between the haute cuisine of Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros and Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste of Things, 2023 is quite the year for the French foodie film. Of course, being a Frederick Wiseman movie, Menus-Plaisirs has a scope quite a bit wider than the domestic ambit of Tran’s 19th-century lover-gourmets. In his signature fashion, the filmmaker studies a panoply of aspects of his central subject, the Troisgros restaurant, from its meal preparations and clientele to the local farms and cheesemakers that supply its ingredients. The magic of a Wiseman documentary, in addition to the hypnotic rhythms they generate from quotidian activities, is in the serendipitous accrual of detail and meaning across typically extended durations, so that what happens in one scene retroactively attains new significance during later ones. Here, an in-depth description of how sulfites are used to inhibit oxidization in wine forms a dialogue with discussions about various other human interventions in food cultivation, from agriculture to cheese ripening, eventually adding up to a broader existential picture of ecological balance, contingency, and the flux of trends. Like all of the institutions he studies, Wiseman finds a microcosm of society - if not life itself - in the bureaucracies, systems of labor, creative processes, and social rituals of Troisgros. He also finds a mirror of his own practice, with the aesthetic and culinary exactitude of the chefs echoing his patient and studiously watchful style. Movingly, Wiseman seems to invite especial parallels with the gregarious, august Michel Troisgros, who passionately carries on a decades-long tradition as time takes its inexorable course, and who extols the power of learning through nothing so simple as our attention and observation.
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