EBTL.050817

On Food, Film, and the Documentary Mode,

in Two Takes

i. Kings of Pastry, 2009. Directed by D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus

So Kings of Pastry, more or less as promised, provides an engaging, entertaining look at the Concours Un des Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (MOF), which is less a competition in the “there can be only one” sense than it is a sort of final exam in excellence for pastry chefs, a more exclusive and prestigious red seal for the profession. The characters are likeable, the human drama compelling, the tension high, and yes, as promised by the promotional copy, there are lots of grown men crying. Altogether, though, what Kings of Pastry fails to be (in my opinion) is interesting. To be fair, I don’t think this was the directors’ goal in the first place. It fits comfortably into a particular mould, a popular subgenre of the modern food documentary, the hero’s quest. The narrative of obsession, the precarious balancing of family life and emotional health with devotion to one’s craft, are all familiar and effective. But the film is not really about obsession, it doesn’t think about obsession—it merely features it. Neither are we are given any particular insight—or maybe only the barest flashes—into the world of pastry and pâtissiers, and for a film about people striving to be the “best craftsmen in France,” we learn very little about the craft itself.

Perhaps my critique stems from the fact that a significant portion of the documentary is devoted to sugarcraft—the elaborate, delicate showpieces of the competition, the sugar-and-chocolate sculptures they call bijoux—rather than to pastry proper. These are the great crowd-pleasers, of course, truly astonishing feats of ribbon and blown-sugar confectionery, but of somewhat less interest to me because they are effectively inedible (also stupid-looking). Some time is devoted to the cakes, tartlets, and various choux that populate the other categories of the MOF, but for the most part these magically appear on the screen; we do not see how these creations, the products of great artistry, training, and practice in their own right, come into being. They are the quotidian fare of pâtisserie, fading into obscurity beside the glitz of the showpieces that in their unchecked alienness and tasteless (post)modernism begin to remind one of a Delia Deetz sculpture.1 The bulk of the craftsmanship highlighted in the film concerns itself with turning food into nonfood (well, to the extent that pure sugar is “food”), and in the end, the craft of pastry is rendered no less opaque than at the outset.

One of the most interesting moments of the film, which passes almost unremarked, occurs in the opening scene, as part of then-President Nicolas Sarkozy’s speech at the MOF awards ceremony: “There are not two forms of intelligence, two kinds of skill,” Sarkozy states. “Manual skill does not fall from the sky any more than an intellectual skill. I don’t want any more of this concept in our country. Because this idea is morally scandalous.” In the new France, the France of today, the hard work, devotion, and skill of the craftsman/worker (ouvrier) shall be respected, the artificial separation of these labours collapsed. But where and how shall this be recognized? Certainly, the MOF must master every element of the craft, but there is a certain irony that this valorization is conferred in a context where the craft is shown at its most rarefied, that only where the presentation is so abstracted from eating and food becomes (visual) art, that the craft is said to reach its apogee.

I do not intend this as a polemic against the pièce montée, and I have no firm opinions about the relationship or distinction between craft and art. Without the decorative flourish, I would have a pretty insubstantial skeleton of a life. Carême’s famous dictum that “The Fine Arts are five in number: Painting, Music, Poetry, Sculpture, and Architecture—whereof the principle branch is confectionary” underlies Kings of Pastry, but I have to wonder what, in this formulation, is architecture assumed to be for? To house? Or to materialize some sacred geometry or social order? And subsequently, what is pastry for? What is it supposed to do? Merely to dazzle? If so, fine. A similar question could be asked of the documentary, and if the answer is merely to entertain, also fine.

At one point, the head judge of the MOF states, “each product is a moral dilemma.” That he’s talking about a cream puff makes this cute, a perfect hyperbolic statement about the high stakes of the MOF. But what are the stakes, exactly? The men competing have devoted years of their lives in preparation, and to wear the stripes of a maître ouvrier has considerable career implications, but that is not all he is talking about. The politics of French food are fraught and complex, and very overtly tied to French national identity. It is no accident that the collar that only les maîtres ouvriers are permitted to wear bears the French tricolour. Is the moral dilemma one of the dignity of the profession at war with human sympathy, the need to judge impartially in order to protect the standards of excellence (and by extension the dignity of the nation)? Is it thus, writ small, about patriotic duty struggling with one’s basic fraternal co-feeling?

Pennebaker and Hegedus, who also made The War Room (1993) about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign (as well as the 1967 Bob Dylan doc Don’t Look Back and a slew of other music documentaries), choose not to consider these questions. They seem interested in neither the stuff of the trade nor the stuff for which it might conceivably stand, but in something that I suppose is called “human drama.” Perhaps I should not begrudge Kings of Pastry for not doing something it was not intending to do. In the spirit of the good documentarian, the duo profess that their approach is strictly “observational,” but the Michael Moores of the world aside, this is what so many documentaries presume to do already. Indeed, it is the premise upon which the genre is founded: to present things as they “really happened.” The observational mode, however, does not erase authorial agency, even if it seeks to obscure it. Someone still decides where to point the camera, decides what stays in and what gets edited out. There is no view from nowhere.

Certainly, some of the competitors featured in Kings of Pastry are genuinely sympathetic, but I nevertheless left the theatre feeling that the whole thing was a trifle (pun intended) superficial. It remains a sort of anonymous human drama wherein one encounters the characters very much as dramatic placeholders who move only for the mechanistic unfolding of the plot. Even the subject itself feels like a placeholder. It could feature any men (men specifically: as of 2010, there were no meilleures ouvriéres in pastry), in any grueling trial, risking any everything. There is triumph and tragedy, but little exploration of pastry as a craft, an esoteric set of manoeuvres and the traditions, institutions, appetites, and desires that give them meaning. But I don’t suppose my complaint that I was hoping for a more incisive analysis of the cream puff will be widely shared. Out of good taste and respect for, I don’t know, I guess emotions as a thing, I will resist the urge to pursue further the analogy between human drama and blown-sugar treats that are seductive but ultimately undigestible. But you know I’m thinking it.

ii. El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, 2010. Directed by Gereon Wetzel

In quite another vein is Gereon Wetzel’s El Bulli: Cooking in Progress. Many of the reviews I encountered before watching the film suggested it was a little on the boring side, but I think that this may be why I enjoyed it as much as I did. In fact, it may also be why I might consider it such a “good” documentary, as opposed to “such a documentary,” as I feel about Pennebaker and Hegedus’s Kings of Pastry. It is exactly this foregrounding of human drama and its articulation within a narrative arc that is absent from El Bulli: Cooking in Progress. The film is not an exposé, nor an exhaustive how-it’s-made procedural breakdown, but it is nonetheless very much about the work of El Bulli. El Bulli in process, not solely in progress, as the title declares.

The double meaning of “cooking in progress” is apropos—chef Ferran Adrià (who helmed the restaurant from 1997 until its closure in 2011, and with whose name it has become synonymous) conceived of El Bulli as an avant-garde restaurant, and was explicitly concerned with advancing the field. Under Adrià’s leadership, El Bulli enjoyed the reputation for many years as the best restaurant in the world, and remains a landmark institution for the approach to cooking variously dubbed “molecular gastronomy” and, more recently, “culinary modernism.”2 “Have we done this before?” is the question that echoes throughout the film, throughout a creative process that is at the same time concerned with not succumbing to the allure of the merely novel. Whether Adrià succeeds in avoiding the trap of cooking that is clever yet devoid of substance is not for me judge, as I never have and never will eat at El Bulli, but Wetzel—director of How to Make a Book with Steidl (2010), a film about the art of making books about art—manages to capture and communicate this tension in subtle but effective ways. The film is almost a technical drama, lingering over the careful deliberations of Adrià’s creative team, their experiments, discussions, and negotiations, with each other and with the ingredients that they are transforming. There are no talking heads in Cooking in Progress, no confessions, no expository dialogue to break up the (slow, deliberate) “action,” as it plays out over the course of three acts.

The film opens as El Bulli closes for the season, with the team packing up their equipment and moving to their lab in Barcelona. This is neither metaphor nor affectation: the research space of Adrià’s inner circle—Oriol Castro, Eduard Xatruch, and Eugeni de Diego—is both laboratory and kitchen, with burners and skillets, thermal immersion circulators, and nitrogen baths in equal measure. Here they will spend the next few months working with various ingredients to see what can be done with them. No menus are assembled; there is only a highly methodical free play with the properties of various foodstuffs. Free in the sense that the conventional limits of the food (both in terms of culinary use/application, and of actual physical properties) are disregarded, or at least re-evaluated, although the strict assessment, detail, and inscription of the results of the experiments places a different set of constraints upon the activity. It is a sort of operationalized, material brainstorming.

Following this, we return to Catalonia, to Cala Montjoi, the site of El Bulli, where preparations begin for reopening the restaurant: the training and organization of the staff, the assembly and fine-tuning of the menu, the arranging of stones. Finally, we see the restaurant in progress, although only in a very restricted fashion. Rarely are we shown the patrons in the act of enjoying their food; they arrive, take pictures, revel in the aura of the establishment, and while they eat, we retreat to the kitchen, where dishes are constructed, expedited, and perpetually re-evaluated. It is during this sequence that we have the least sense of time. Are these the services of a single night? A week? A month? Several months? Suddenly, it is October, the season winds up, the staff begin to close the restaurant down, and the film ends on exactly the note upon which it opened. We realize that what we have been watching is an exploration of the routine—it is not a tale of genius or mad science, the spectacular fancies of high gastronomy, but of the routine work that goes on behind the glittering, variegated, often quite challenging facade.

If there is a climax to the film, it can be identified only retrospectively. In a late scene, at the end of a seating, Adrià calls to Castro something to the effect of “Hey, Oriol, this year we can still keep up.” The film ends five minutes later, in a quiet montage of delicately staged menu photography, and one realizes that this was the resolution of whatever dramatic arc the film has accommodated, as well as a summation of Adrià’s own personal mission as a chef with El Bulli, and the aporia at its heart. Keep up with what? Indeed, the majority of the emotional tenor of the film is provided through the handful of subtle exchanges amongst Adrià and his team. Scenes where one tastes some preparation, a dish or component thereof, and in the moments of silence that follow, the audience feels the egos at work, the economy of creative energy, the authority and ambition, all through a protracted stare or averted gaze. The result is not melodramatic (there are no chilling canned strings or a Law & Order–esque knell to signal the import of the situation) so much as it is even slightly absurd in its portentousness, and this awkward comedy ultimately lends the movie a lot of its charm.

For all the behind-the-scenes action, however, the actual functioning of El Bulli remains somewhat abstruse. We see some of what goes into the dishes of vanishing ravioli, parmesan crystals, and minted ice lakes or whatever, but a mysterious quality is retained. Wetzel himself has said that “it is the lacuna that I like, the vacuum of representation.”3 It gives the interested party just enough to see how the spirit is enmeshed with the instrumentation, without becoming lost in technical detail. Thusly is the mystique of the restaurant allowed to persist. “There’s no trick,” the film seems to say, “it’s just a simple trick!”

I expect that this measured, unsensational approach to the documentary may not be for everyone, but I found it quite refreshing. One doesn’t leave the theatre feeling like one has been told a tired story by way of a cinematic machinery at pains to proclaim its unvarnished verité. In a strange way, Wetzel manages to give life (a human life) to a subject matter that, like Adrià’s denatured creations, could seem quite cold and unapproachable, both alienated and alienating, and does so without resorting to the broad, garish strokes of documentary bathos. I suppose I can’t say much more than that El Bulli: Cooking in Progress is interesting if you are interested in that sort of thing. Although I didn’t think I was, really, until it turned out that I am. Ha.