Menu-Plaisir: Les Troisgros
Director: Frederick Wiseman
Cert: None
Genre: Documentary
Starring: Marie-Pierre Troisgros, César Troisgros, Léo Troisgros, Michel Troisgros
Running Time: 4 hrs mins
Frederick Wiseman has been a quiet, persistent observer of modern life for nearly six decades, an artist whose presence is so unobtrusive that his films appear to have filmed themselves.
Yet behind every frame is the formidable intelligence of a former law professor who has camped out at institutions across the United States and beyond for months at a time, then spent many more months – often more than a year – shaping hundreds of hours of material into rigorously constructed nonfiction narratives.
Since Titicut Follies, in 1967, Wiseman has made more than 40 documentaries, each a meticulous immersion in institutional life: a high school, a welfare office, New York Public Library, Paris Opéra Ballet, the University of California at Berkeley and the National Gallery in London.
With the sumptuous Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros, the film-maker finds a subject as meticulous and patient as he is. Les Troisgros is a three-Michelin-star restaurant in Ouches, in the Loire region of France. The Troisgros family have run it for four generations.
Wiseman’s four-hour film invites the viewer to live at the pace of the grazing horses visible through the restaurant window. There are no talking heads, no narration and no explanatory subtitles beyond a glimpse of the sign at the local train station and the Michelin plaque outside Troisgros. Everything else – every gesture, rhythm and decision – must be absorbed from observation.
The family patriarch, Michel – gregarious, philosophical and prone to lovely bouts of wittering – moves between produce markets, the kitchen, farms and diningroom tables with the assurance of a man who has spent a lifetime building an institution.
His sons, César and Léo, increasingly confident in shaping the cuisine, provide the film’s quiet counterpoint: an unspoken generational transition plays out amid caviar-and-strawberry debates and the sautéing of kidneys destined to meet passion fruit.
The kitchens, filmed with quiet reverence by Wiseman and his cinematographer, James Bishop, operate less like the high-pressure battlegrounds depicted in The Bear and Boiling Point than like an orchestra. Fish are descaled. Herbs are chopped. Molten chocolate is coaxed across marble. The cooking is ingredient led. Pretty Italian herb leaves with “the taste of capers … might work in a battuta or with a fish”.
Everything, from the placement of tablemats to the grazing habits of cattle destined for the table, is considered in exact detail.
What emerges is not a portrait not only of a craft but also of a hive. The labour that sustains fine dining, the cost of perfection, and the weight of legacy underscore every lengthy conversation about wine or crayfish. Wiseman has made films about bureaucracies, city halls and cabarets, but here the institution is pleasure itself. It’s a feast that will leave many viewers ravenous.
In cinemas from Friday, January 2nd; at Queen’s Film Theatre, in Belfast, from Friday, January 9th