Review of the film "Menu" - a gastronomic thriller about the loss of taste in life
An appetizing but toothless satire on consumer society.
The past cinematic year surprised with a non-trivial trend of gastronomy - after the perky "Bear" by Hiro Murai and the eccentric "Eruption of Taste" by Peter Strickland, "Menu" by Mark Mylod was released in the international cinemas. Probably the first thriller in the career of a British director who hasn't gone beyond comedies - funny ("The Big White Ladyship") and not so funny ("How Much Do You Have?") - for many years. For Milode, "The Menu" was definitely a kind of step out of his genre comfort zone, an attempt to play on the audience's nerves and, in some ways, even shock them.
A big fan of cooking shows, Tyler (Nicholas Holt) and his girlfriend Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) travel to a distant island to attend a dinner party for genius chef Julian Slovick (Rafe Fiennes). The heroes have no idea that in a couple of hours the long-awaited event, which brought together all the cream of society, will turn into mental and physical torture for them, the main sadist in which will be the same famous chef.
Like Ruben Estlund's notorious Triangle of Sorrow, The Menu is at first not the most veiled mockery of the privileged class, a collection of rich men and women who have become accustomed to taking everything and everyone around them for granted, drowning in their own spiritual emptiness and arrogant pretentiousness. Each of Julian Slovick's guests, whether an elite restaurant critic or an aging star of American sitcoms, came to his dinner not for mere hedonistic pleasure, but for the status and exclusivity of the very fact of his presence at this memorable evening. Later Julian would accuse his clients of hypocrisy - and he would be absolutely right. Over many years working in the best restaurants in the world Slowick has learned to distinguish all shades of elitist duplicity, which eventually reduced his sincere love of cooking in a state of tedious obsession - an eternally unsatisfied desire for perfection. Alas, Julian's character was so consumed with righteous anger at the rich people who devalued his food that he failed to notice how he himself lost a considerable measure of humanity.
In time, the dinner ceases to be languid and turns into a real theater of the absurd, each subsequent act of which makes the guests more and more fidgety on their chairs. Alas, it takes them a long time to realize that the exclusive presentation, supposedly designed to change the focus of the food, is an outright mockery. As events unfold, the degree of Slowik's madness only grows, but fake applause continues to swell around him. Of course, it is Tyler, the chef's devoted admirer, who tries hardest, ready to sign off on the compliments at every opportunity.
In the disarming crankiness of the cook's guests one can see a not too exaggerated reference to the consumer society, for which the fact of possessing an object is always more important than its spiritual value. However, the overly cartoonish characters and the rather sketchy emotional dramaturgy of screenwriters Seth Reiss and Will Tracy do not really get into the events taking place in "The Menu". Even the central figure of the film - psychopathic Chief Slovick, brilliantly played by Ralph Fiennes - seems too blurred, the character of Anya Taylor-Joy seems to have been created only for a bright final twist.
In visual terms, "Menu" impresses with its chic geometry of the frame, which unwittingly refers to the chef's obsessive desire to bring each dish to absolute perfection. The only problem is that in cooking, as in any other art form, the process of perception is always more important than the result. And in this respect, The Menu looks like a film that may not be the spiciest, but it is not boring at all.
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