If food movies have taught me anything, it’s that the key to spectacular cooking is balance. (Food movies have also taught me that life is a meaningless struggle to produce beauty that people will devour or dismiss, and that emotions are more communicable than salmonella. Food movies: educational!) Balance is the difference between perfectly seasoned and disgustingly salty; the difference between quietly sweet and unbearably twee. Balance is the hallmark of Mostly Martha.
But maybe more than anything, balance informs every loving, nearly-pornographic shot of the tidiest restaurant in the entire world.
In a nutshell, Martha is a single-minded and brilliant chef whose life is thrown out of whack when she becomes legal guardian of her niece and the restaurant owner brings in another chef to help balance (ding!) the workload. The movie follows her attempts to make a connection with an uncommunicative and grieving kid, and her accidental attraction to a messy chef whose Italian cuisine is a thinly-veiled metaphor for his warm, heart-melting nature. (I am just guessing on that last part, since the chemistry between the leads never caught my interest, but you know it’s true. We’ve all seen food movies.)
In one of the most notable twists on food-movie tropes, Martha is one of the few cinema chefs on record who doesn’t struggle under the burden of anonymous, undervalued futility. Her restaurant is successful, even though they appear to have only ten tables:
(Here’s how you know you live in New York: I saw all that open space between tables and laughed out loud.)
The minimalist dining room is a reflection of the chef in charge behind the scenes; Martha runs a seriously clean kitchen, in technique and otherwise.
(I love this shot. She looks so delightfully and inexplicably bummed out about her pristine kingdom. Poor Martha – never enough adorable copper pots around when you want them, I suppose.)
When Martha’s sister dies, Martha becomes guardian to her niece Lea; this goes about as well as can be expected between a devastated child and a woman who thinks serving squab to a kid is a productive use of time and birds. Things improve markedly when Martha starts bringing Lea to work, where Lea is quiet and vaguely helpful, and where she finally gets an appetite courtesy of Italian interloper Mario, whose pasta is tasty and without the emotional baggage that attends all Martha’s meals. (Little Lea knows all about food as metaphor.)
Initially, Martha bristles at the suggestion she needs another chef in her sphere – and rightly so, since the restaurant seems French, from the recipes and tehcniques in the opening montage. Management want to keep him, but refreshingly, Mario himself lays no claim to the kitchen – in fact, when he figures out Martha didn’t have a say in his hiring, he’s ready to walk unless Martha herself wants him to be there. “It’s her kitchen,” he declares.
(I might not tout this moment quite so much except that in the appalling American adaptation, Mario’s counterpart makes a big joke out of the fact that he doesn’t listen to a thing she says in the kitchen, which is treated as lighthearted romantic banter instead of the mutinous personality conflict it really is, as any chef and/or good food movie will tell you. Of all the changes, that one grated the most, and singlehandedly demotes No Reservations from a food movie to a movie that happens to have a chef in it. But I’m getting ahead of myself, and there will be plenty of time to mock No Reservations later.)
Mario proves to be quite helpful, ably handling the lighter fish dishes that the owner wanted to add, and bringing a new balance (ding!) to the menu. Now the kitchen palette changes; the colors are brighter, and the presentation of the dishes themselves becomes more complicated (like Martha’s life! I see what you did there, movie).
For a movie that doesn’t show us as much of the process as, say, Chocolat, director Sandra Nettlebeck knows exactly how to show you the effort that goes into a beautiful dish, doesn’t she? While things move smoothly in the kitchen, Mario and Martha’s tension is ratcheting up. The difference between Martha’s painstaking French training and Mario’s Italian style comes to a head when he declares his intentions chef-to-chef by coming over to Martha’s and cooking Martha and Lea a picnic, which they eat off the floor.
Here the movie loses me (I am not a picnic person, we have tables for a reason), but I appreciate the visual metaphor of an informal communal meal! Almost as much as I appreciate getting wine and pesto on a pricey rug.
The film progresses from here exactly the way one would expect, and despite a little cynical side-eye (especially in the last fifteen minutes), I’m largely all right with that. The formula for Mostly Martha a well-known recipe of the talented loner who learns to love; however, here, the balance saves the execution.
