Foodie film filled with bite-sized dramas
JAY STONE The dramatic high point of the foodie film Haute Cuisine — based on the true story of a woman (horreurs!) hired to cook for the president of France — comes when the new chef, Hortense Laborie, has been asked to create a special meal for the president’s family. However, in the main kitchen, the all-male, all-sexist cooks are fuming because Hortense has included a plate of homemade cream cheese on her menu. The main kitchen is to make the dessert and cream cheese seems to be infringing on their territory.
It’s a crisis only to the artistes who see Laborie as a threat: The presidential palate is disputed territory in Haute Cuisine, and Laborie is crossing a gastronomical Maginot Line with every meal. As for the ethical questions it raises — is cream cheese a cheese, a dessert, an amuse bouche or something else entirely? — that’s soon forgotten. Like most of the film, it’s an unfinished dish.
Haute Cuisine is based on Daniele Mazet-Delpeuch, who in the 1980s cooked for Francois Mitterand for two years. As embodied by Laborie (played by the handsome Catherine Frot), she is a pleasant, if somewhat imperious, country cook and owner of a truffle farm hired because she seems best qualified to prepare the president’s favourite food: Good old-fashioned home cooking.
Of course, this being France, he’s talking about duckling surprise, cuttlefish chowder and the dessert known as nun’s farts. “I detest complicated concoctions,” says the president — played with just the right combination of noblesse oblige and fading power by Jean d’Ormesson — as he sits Laborie down for a long chat including recitations by heart from favourite cookbooks. Being president of France is an elegant occupation.
With her talented pastry chef Nicolas (Arthur Dupont), Laborie proceeds to whip up a lot of rich-sounding dishes. It’s not much of a surprise when it turns out that the president has to cut down a bit on the fats, desserts, sauces and cheeses on doctors’ orders. “I hope you like working with fruit,” Laborie tells Nicolas when the cardiogram hits the fan.
The dramas are rather bite-sized, however. While Mitterand ( never named in the film) is dealing with whatever it was Mitterand dealt with (The building of the Chunnel? The fall of the Berlin Wall?), Laborie is preoccupied with having to fetch her own muslin to drain her cabbage stuffed with Scottish salmon when the main kitchen refuses to co-operate. Not that these are trivial manners, especially in France, but as a film it doesn’t add up to much beyond the sight of many delicious dishes.
Director and co- writer Christian Vincent tries to give it an extra layer of tension by telling the story in flashback. Laborie is now a cook at a research facility in Antarctica — where the duck can sometimes turn out a bit dry — and she is being pursued by an Australian documentary-maker who wants the inside story on the Elysée Palace.
Laborie isn’t talking, though. Perhaps that’s because she doesn’t have anything to say. It’s all been expressed in her Saint-Honore cake, topped with cream like granny used to make. It’s mouth-watering, but not exactly nutritious.