The swanky restaurant where revenge is the order of the day
But beware — you’ll need a strong stomach for Fiennes’s fiendish comedy
The Menu (15, 106 mins)
Verdict: Deliciously nasty ★★★★I Armageddon Time (15, 114 mins)
Verdict: Engaging 1980s tale ★★★★I
SKEWERING the solemn pretension that surrounds elaborate, exorbitant restaurant-cooking is nothing new. Twenty years ago, a TV series called Posh Nosh did it deliciously, with Arabella Weir and Richard E. Grant as the frightfully la- di- da owners of the Quill & Tassel, who talked about ‘ embarrassing’ the aubergine in a glazed pan and ‘disabling a partridge in its own jus’.
So The Menu, a dark comedy or, if you prefer, mirthful horror film, set in a ridiculously high- end restaurant on a small island, isn’t what you’d call hugely original. Moreover, the film’s satirical targets — the imperious celebrity chef, his obsequious staff, the reverential customers, cooking as conceptual art — are extremely easy prey. With no apology for my foodie metaphors, it really is like shooting sushi-fresh fish in a barrel.
All that said, The Menu is enormous fun throughout, and as you might expect of a cast led by Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor
Joy, gloriously acted. Fiennes plays Julian Slowik, who runs his famously exclusive restaurant, Hawthorn, like a fascist dictator. When he claps his hands, his kitchen brigade snap to rigid attention. When he commands the diners not to eat his extraordinary food but to ‘taste, savour, relish’ it, they melt with admiration.
The story unfolds over the course of a single day and night, beginning with the arrival, by boat, of Hawthorn’s customers for that evening’s service. They include a young couple, Tyler (Nicholas
Hoult), who worships Slowik, and Margot ( Taylor- Joy), the only guest left cold by his genius. Then there’s influential restaurant critic Lilian Bloom (Janet McTeer) and her devoted editor, a movie star (John Leguizamo) and his PA/girlfriend, an older couple who are clearly regulars, and three bumptious male colleagues on a corporate jolly.
They are all met off the boat by the restaurant’s humourless maitre d’ (Hong Chau), whose stony- faced welcome — ‘ we’ll endeavour to make your evening
as pleasant as possible’ — sounds ominously insincere. Dinner, they are told, ‘typically lasts four hours and 25 minutes’.
That offers plenty of time for whatever chef Julian has in store for them, which only gradually becomes apparent.
As it does, the story’s lack of originality again comes into focus. Without wanting to give anything away, I was strongly reminded d of a brilliant Argentinian film, m Wild Tales ( 2015), in which a commercial airline pilot takes ultimate revenge on a group of passengers.
By lampooning wealth and excess, The Menu also mines the same seam as this year’s winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Triangle of Sadness. And there are vivid echoes of any number of Agatha Christie adaptations — think of this film as Death On The Napkin — as we are whisked from table to table, discovering a little more each time about the guests and their grubby secrets.
Still, most entertaining movies, doubtless like most great dishes,
are derivative in one way or another. And before things start getting decidedly gruesome in The Menu, there is some cherishable mickey-taking of culinary posturing. I laughed out loud at the ‘ breadless bread plate’, chef ’ s way of dealing with the tendency of customers to eat too much of the stuff. ‘ It’s fiendish!’ declares an approving Bloom.
Another of the courses, simply called Memory, is inspired by Slowik’s own traumatic childhood recollection of stopping his father from assaulting his mother. Which is not that much of a leap from being supplied with earphones so that you can listen to the sound of crashing waves while eating seafood — as once happened to me at a swanky restaurant in the Home Counties. Screenwriters Seth Reiss and Will Tracy plainly had a hoot with all this, inventing dishes such as Dungeness crab with fermented yogurt whey, and allowing the sommelier to rhapsodise about a wine’s note of ‘barnyard funk’.
And British director Mark Mylod, whose early TV credits include Cold Feet and The Royle Family but who has more recently worked on the fantastically acerbic drama Succession, has a sure feel for edgy comedy. You will need a strong stomach, but The Menu is richly enjoyable fare.
I ALSO really liked Armageddon Time, , writer-director James Gray’s Gr semi- autobiographical gr coming-of-age story, st set in Reagan-era Queens, Q New York. Another An top-notch cast is led by Sir Anthony Hopkins, Ho Anne Hathaway wa and Jeremy Strong, although alt the most eyecatching cat performance comes co from young Banks Ba Repeta.
He H plays the adolescent Paul, Pau a spirited white kid from a blue-collar Jewish family fam who properly discovers cov racism after befriending bef his black classmate clas Johnny (Jaylin Webb, Web also terrific). Very Ve engagingly, if a little selfconsciously at times, Gray plunges us into cinematic mat territory already well-explored wellof by the likes of Noah N Baumbach and Woody Wood Allen.
We follow Paul’s relationships ship with Johnny, his devoted mother m (Hathaway), limited father (Strong), and tender grandfather (Hopkins), who turns out to have escaped Nazioccupied Europe by fleeing first to Liverpool and then to America, little of which explains his gentle Welsh accent, but never mind; Hopkins gives his usual masterclass.
It’s a tale about race, religion and bigotry but also social mobility, as Paul’s parents and grandparents invest in him all the hopes that they have failed to realise for themselves. And as a bonus, as if to remind us of his film’s factual roots in 1980s New York City, Gray even deals up a couple of Trumps.