Richly satisfying look at a larger-than-life culinary icon
Julia (PG, 93 mins) Directed by Julie Cohen and Betsy West Reviewed by James Croot ★★★★
This endearing and enlightening soup-to-nuts tale beautifully captures the essence of a truly larger-than-life figure.
Through her cookbooks and TV shows, Julia Child introduced homemakers to the joy of French cooking, breaking down complicated recipes into easy-tofollow constituent parts.
Decades after they first aired, programmes like have an addictive quality to them, as Child entertainingly wades into some truly tricky dishes with a winning mix of casual insouciance and ruthless efficiency, unafraid of making mistakes along the way.
That first immensely popular series, which ran for a decade from 1963, really was a high-wire act. Using a Boston Gas Company’s demonstration kitchen, it was recorded live with no editing, no teleprompter and required ‘‘a lot of creative work with duct tape’’.
That breathless quality that gives Child’s shows their vibrancy? It was because she never memorised anything – she was adlibbing the whole time.
But her unlikely rise to television stardom and immortality (she was 51 when she made her debut and 88 when filming her final series) is just one aspect of her many-storied life.
Through the use of surprisingly intimate archival photos (many taken by her beloved husband Paul), rich audio and video of Child and interviews with family members and colleagues, we learn how she initially led a ‘‘leisurely butterfly life’’ and how, by her own admission, if she had followed her father’s advice and married a scion of the publishing empire, she would have ‘‘played tennis, golf and been an alcoholic’’.
But the young Child wanted a life of adventure, joining America’s Office of Strategic Services with the intention of becoming a spy. Instead, a posting to Ceylon as a typist clerk eventuated in her only having eyes for her co-worker, graphic artist Paul Child.
The pair became inseparable, as he was posted first to China and then to France in the aftermath of World War II.
It was there that she fell in love with French cooking, citing a lifechanging dish involving sole with butter. ‘‘I never got over it, they take food so seriously,’’ she recounts in one interview.
Joining 11 GIs in enrolling at Paris’ famed Cordon Bleu cooking school, Child learned the basics and then was determined to spread the gospel, starting first with her American friends, and then via an ambitious cookbook project that painfully, eventually became the seminal
That’s also when the opportunity to appear on a Boston TV book show transformed her life.
The producers were shocked when Child asked if she could demonstrate how to make an omelette. Her appearance was a hit, the station’s phone lines were overloaded and a cooking show pilot was swiftly ordered.
As with their awarding-winning 2018 look at supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentarian duo Julie Cohen and Betsy West do a superb job of corralling the tales and vivid archival material into a satisfying narrative, and also look at Child’s achievements in a wider context.
As well as being the woman who tried to pull American households away from their obsession with convenience foods and persuade them to create and consume meals with ‘‘style, flair and imagination’’, she was also an advocate for planned parenthood and, in her later years, a tireless fundraiser for the Aids Foundation.
This warm and witty portrait paints her as an important figure of the American feminist movement, an incorrigible flirt and a voracious eater. ‘‘She had the fastest fork of anyone I’ve ever eaten with,’’ fellow TV chef Jacques Pepin chuckles.
Throw in some mouth-watering food porn, especially over the end credits, and the result is richly satisfying and absorbing viewing.