Translated material
Anton Dolin. Cinema-28: Food for a good soul
Cinema-28: Food for a good soul - tasty and healthy
Anton Dolin
Publication date: March 7, 2001
Anton Dolin
Publication date: March 7, 2001
Towards the release of the films "Quick Food and Women" and "Chocolate"
Small cafe. A lively queue in which everyone is ready to stand - and all in order to spend at least a few minutes in the legendary establishment. This is important - exactly how many minutes: they pay not for food, but for place and time, 50 cents per minute. Not only is the food fast here, but also the waitresses, deftly scurrying between tables on roller skates. This is a world of fulfilled desires, a dream come true. Cut to: from a big American city you find yourself in a small European village, from the future to the past. An old-fashioned sign invites you through a creaky door, where a friendly hostess will select for you the chocolate candy you crave most. I want it, even if you don’t even know it yet.
“Chocolate” and “Fast Food Fast Women” (the English title still sounds much more appropriate than the Russian one) talk about the same thing - the power of food over the human heart. It is the heart - the stomach, “through which the path must lie,” is out of the question. Who among us is unfamiliar with the desire to “intercept” something in difficult times, that is, to eat? And not just anything, but something specific, for everyone: eating habits are no less an individual sign than fingerprints. Therefore, it is very difficult to make a good film about food: you can show how beautiful food is (Wong Kar-Wai masterfully did this in “In the Mood for Love”), you can say something smart about food (as Greenaway managed in “The Cook, the Thief, His wife and her lover" or Bernard Rapp in "A Matter of Taste"), but it is not easy to make the viewer understand that food is serious, it is important. It is not easy to make the viewer hungry and satisfy this hunger by watching a movie.
talks "Chocolate" about how important it is to find the key to human individuality, to the most complex code - taste. A closed community, a French town of “rural type” is built on the principle of uniformity: everyone goes to the same church, obeys the same laws, loves the same mayor - the local virtuous Count, who has ruled for centuries. The chocolate shop becomes a mechanism for transforming a person into a Person, into a personality. You just need to determine the very candy that suits you, and then... Then the spouses who are fed up with each other will find love again, the grandmother will meet with her grandson, the downtrodden wife of a drunken bartender will leave her husband - and even an old diabetic woman who has only one life left in the world in a matter of days, she will spend these days in a way she could not even dream of. You won’t be able to save yourself by filling your stomach, but it is quite possible to find inner freedom thanks to your favorite chocolate. It's not about sweets or even about the forbidden fruit (although for most of the god-obedient residents of the town this fruit is forbidden). The point is to find a hitherto unknown inner self, and in the simplest way - by eating candy. The path to freedom lies through becoming a child; As expected, the first to fall before the aroma of chocolate are children and the elderly.
The concept of a restaurant where you pay only for time and place also goes beyond a simple joke, a cinematic curiosity. In “Quick Food and Women,” the unity of physical food and spiritual food is declared. Coming to the diner, the film's characters, unemployed people and prostitutes, strive for one thing - contact, consolation. And the ice cream that a 70-year-old pensioner buys a prospective girlfriend when he meets and that a restless waitress and taxi driver eat on a night date is a way to find a common language and not be left alone. Therefore, in the end, you pay not for the menu, but for concepts no less virtual than friendship, understanding, love - you pay for time and place.
Loneliness and ways to overcome it are the main theme not only of “Quick Food and Women ,” but also of the entire work of the New York Israeli Amos Kollek. The heroine of the first film of his trilogy, which concludes with "Fast Food", Sue, could not find a kindred spirit in the big city; her indisputable virtues - beauty, intelligence, intelligence, delicacy - were in the concrete jungle only steps to the inevitable grave. Having betrayed his tragic image, in the new film Kollek builds a utopia, makes a comedy, that is, a story about how to overcome loneliness and meet a soul mate. The way - no, not to get to know each other, but to feel another person - becomes food, a magical meeting place - a fast food diner. Here are the starting points of stories leading in the space of the film to one or another happy ending: one elderly regular will end up with the woman of his dreams - a young “specialist in Jungian analysis” from a nearby peep show, and another, after much ups and downs, will find happiness in the arms of a lonely “beauty” over sixty... All of them, from a taxi driver writing intellectual novels to a stuttering prostitute, will meet in the final paradise - a fantastic restaurant with fast food and fast women.
The director of "Chocolate" Lasse Hallström has a different goal. It's no coincidence that he doesn't struggle with loneliness; Unlike the urban Kollek, a resident of Jerusalem and New York, Holström is a native of rural and cozy Sweden. On the contrary, from a community that deprives its individual members of the right to their own taste, their own view, their own destiny, he singles out several daredevils who decided to take a brave step: try chocolate candy and become themselves. Therefore, if at the beginning of the film we see all the village residents in the church, where they must observe more or less the same form of clothing, then in the finale they gather at a carnival festival, where everyone is free to choose any mask. However, despite the total opposite of their goals, Kollek and Holström talk about the same thing - about how food becomes the key to happiness, be it in unity or, conversely, in freedom. Who cares?
Of course, the bearers of ideas in both films are women. In Kollek's case, this is the director's constant muse Anna Thompson - a melancholy blonde with large features and an expressive figure, who embodied the image of the waitress Bella. Bella longingly awaits her thirty-fifth birthday - the middle of her life, when she is supposed to know at least something about her future. Bella is immersed in the present: her mother annoying her on the phone; neglecting her for the sake of young girls and the lawful wife of his lover - a stupid aging playboy from Broadway; finally a job. Work is the best thing in her life, it is an opportunity to give absolution to all the suffering, the loners, smoking the sky with nothing to do in a provincial diner, where Bella serves scrambled eggs and coffee to the guests. Work also becomes a calling for Vian, the heroine of “Chocolate”: like the heroine of a fairy tale, together with the North Wind she comes to the city with her daughter Anouk, playing with an invisible kangaroo. Vian is ready to overcome any obstacles, fight the conformity of ordinary people and the intransigence of the authorities, in order to feed all the unfortunate people with fragrant and mysterious (prepared with the addition of pepper, according to a Mexican recipe) chocolate. Vian played Juliette Binoche , more than ever, has cemented her status as an international star here, having come a long way from the films of Leos Carax to The English Patient: she does not play with facial expressions or intonation, she has enough charisma - radiant eyes and a slight smile on her lips.
Both “Food and Women” and “Chocolate” are lyrical comedies with a fairy tale flavor, and therefore the authors more than reward their heroines. New York Cinderella Bella receives an inheritance from an unfamiliar old woman whom she recently saved from street hooligans, and becomes a millionaire: now she can buy a villa outside the city, place zebras and camels in the vast garden, open the restaurant of her dreams, find a place there for all her friends, and continue to work as a waitress. Vian, the eternal wanderer, is finally taking root, remaining not a stranger in the town, but almost a mistress. The men - Vian and Bella's chosen ones - are of much less interest to the audience; and, accordingly, the taxi driver never becomes a writer, content with the position of manager in a magical restaurant, and the hippie and gypsy Roux ( Johnny Depp , appearing here as Binoche's henchman) returns to the city to find modest happiness next to his beloved. To become the center of this universe, a woman does not even need to regain the status of Mother, Virgin, and the like; When it comes to food, a woman is the housewife, cook, author and hero of this artistic world, she has the rights of a creator.
And who is around her, who inhabits this world? It is thanks to them, the eaters, that the films become convincing even to those who are completely indifferent to the charm of Thompson or Binoche. Small stories of small characters are precisely what gives charm to both films, allowing them to be viewed not as a speculative proclamation “about tasty and healthy food,” but as a sketch, an exercise on a given topic. Thus, in “Chocolate,” the constantly fasting count (abstinence is evil, synonymous with lack of freedom) and the drunkard bartender Serge turn out to be immune to the magical delicacy (it is symptomatic that the male cook is not able to understand and feel the non-physiological side of food); alas, Alfred Molina and Peter Stormare, who played their roles, do not look convincing, more like cardboard fairy-tale villains. But the brightest spots on the homogeneous chocolate canvas are the old lady who is ready to eat delicacies until her death - Judi Dench, who has a unique chance to receive a second Oscar for a supporting role within five years, and especially the stunning Lena Olin - clearly the best work in the film; here Rosa "Fanny and Alexandra" and Sabina "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" played the silly Josephine, who regains the meaning of life thanks to chocolate. And everyone else - from schoolchildren to a young priest - each tells his own story. This seems to be the case in Kollek’s film: before us passes a series of New York inhabitants, as if collected here from many films - the most striking roles went to Louise Lasserre (Requiem for a Dream, Happiness) and Victor Argo (Smoke, "With a sad face", "Where are you, Lulu", "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai"). The meeting place is under the roof of a fast food restaurant.
In a world where there is no higher power capable of protecting you, taking care of you, there are only two consolations - delicious food and a loved one; That's the whole simple moral of "Food and Women" and "Chocolate". This is trivial, but undeniable. However, if the simple taste of quick hamburgers and chocolates is not to your taste, then you will not like these films either. Look for oysters and profiteroles in expensive Greenway restaurants.