Scenes from Culinary Life: A Round-Up of Big and Small Meals at the Movies

Eating, whether we are talking about haute cuisine or junk food, the oft-depicted breakfast in America or the gluttony associated with the "beggars" in historical films, has almost only two registers in cinema. In the first, eating is the central motif of a film - and there is no shortage of titles on the subject, often evocative of this centrality, from L'Aile ou la Cuisse (1976), by Claude Zidi, From Gabriel Axel 's Babette's Feast (1987) to Pixar's Ratatouille (2007), to name just a few films from the last 50 years. These films, which essentially belong to one genre, comedy, are producer films rather than auteur films.

In the second register, it is only a question of scenes. If cooking is not the subject, these scenes serve to anchor the characters or the story in their cultural, social or psychological reality. Here, what we eat and how we eat it contributes to the viewer's identification with the characters, or, conversely, to underline an exoticism. This is why a large number of screenwriters and filmmakers need, or believe they need, these chestnuts that are the family meal scene, that of the large festive banquet or the romantic dinner to tell a story.

You have 91.33% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.