‘Menus-Plaisirs’ offers a food lover’s paradise
At a time when a glut of true-crime series has been passed off as “documentary” television, it’s nice to see a documentary master still at work.
“Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros” (9 p.m., PBS, TV-PG, check local listings) is director Frederick Wiseman’s 44th feature. The first thing you might notice about “Plaisirs” if you check your TV listings is that it runs four hours! That’s nothing new for Wiseman, whose many films are long, immersive and exhaustive in every meaning of the word.
Through the decades, Wiseman has invited viewers to explore institutions major and minor and allowed us to take a flyon-the-wall look at their inner workings. He has documented the New York Public library and Boston’s City Hall, the Idaho State Legislature, the Louvre in Paris, and buyers at Dallas’ Neiman-Marcus department store, not to mention the quirky community of Belfast, Maine. One of his earliest works, “Titicut
Follies,” was banned from broadcast for years because its depiction of life at a Massachusetts mental institution was seen as invading the privacy of patients. This consideration seems almost quaint in a television landscape that turns the mental illness of “Hoarders” into “entertainment.”
While there have been dozens of series, comedies, film dramas and musicals about teenage school cliques and melodramas, Frederick Wiseman’s 1968 documentary “High School” pretty much wrote the book on the subject.
“Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros” follows a family of French restaurateurs as they go about buying produce and meticulously planning their menus, harvesting herbs, fruit and vegetables from their own bucolic fields and discussing the livestock that contribute to their farm-to-table fare.
The camera follows three men at a table as they discuss, or rather argue, in subtitled French, over the choice of fish for an entree. Once they decide that pike is the most appropriate, there is a long discussion of how to gut and filet it and how to wrap it up, prepare and present the fish. The camera barely moves.
A pastry chef is grilled about his choice of sauce. He explains his decision like a Ph.D. student defending his thesis. The persnickety hyperrationality of French language and culture lends itself perfectly to Wiseman’s approach. Such scenes can last 10 minutes.
It’s no sacrilege to suggest that viewers can dip in and out of this warm bath at their pleasure. Wiseman films can be treated as both a riveting experience, an overheard conversation or as a static screensaver offering a window on fascinating, unknown worlds. As such they are like no other films.