Originally, I planned to review No Reservations in terms of how it treated food as compared to how its “inspiration,” Mostly Martha, treated food. I imagined the universality of food through the cinematic lens. I expected things would be lost in translation, and this would be a little too saccharine, but that it would try hard to enter the canon about the transformative power of food.
Then I actually saw No Reservations.
(They draw a line across their stations! It’s funny because they’re completely unprofessional adults!)
As it turns out, No Reservations is an anti-food movie: it reduces cooking to a generic plot element (quite a feat when 70% of your scenes are in a kitchen); it beats the food-as-emotional-crutch horse to a pulp; and it makes you slightly ill.
It must be said that unlike a lot of Hollywood adaptations of non-U.S. films, No Reservations studied its source material. In fact, the first fifteen minutes are so creepily faithful that I wondered if I had stumbled onto a cinema conspiracy; now I pity the first person who ever stumbled on the Gus Van Sant Psycho remake on TV and wondered if they had dropped acid by accident. (You wish, sir or madam.)
On the other hand, as soon as things started branching off from this slavish recreation the movie completely derailed, so that will serve me right, I guess. The rakish Italian sous-chef, shrewd restaurant owner, and heartbroken moppet are all in place, but the thematic arc turns sour quickly, from the original “Can Martha learn to connect with people through her food rather than just impressing them?” to a plot that’s best summed up in this gem of dialogue between chefs Kate and Nick:
Kate: [indicating kitchen] This is who I am.
Nick: No, it’s not.
Oh! Well, sir, since you cleared THAT up, should she walk out on her job now or in twenty minutes?
It might be less horrific if it wasn’t treated as the truth. (For some mysterious reason, Nick is always absolutely right, and Kate is the one who must come to a series of tearful epiphanies about how wrong she’s been about everything.) And sure, this particular dialogue is insulting on a feminist level, and on a basic-human-communication level, and most other levels, but frankly it’s just baffling that someone would make a movie about a chef that has this dialogue in it.
It’s not like Kate is a mindless government killing machine raised in a stainless-steel lab and trained never to feel human emotions who then has to be taught by the scrappy freedom fighter with whom she becomes entangled that emotions aren’t a sign of weakness on the battlefield, and that loving someone might just give you the courage to blow up an enormous building with a two-handed killshot just in time to envelop the bad guy’s helicopter in divine flame. She’s a chef. “Chef” is one of those jobs that defines someone. You don’t become a chef to pay the bills so that you can run home to your real passion. If you become a chef, it’s because that’s WHO you want to be, not just what you want to do during your day-job hours. So unless Kate up there was standing at the Gap sweater-folding station during this dialogue, I am calling shenanigans.
We’ll pretend someone kicked him in the shin in this shot, just because it makes me feel better.
Now, the DP is decent on this flick (mmm, damning with faint praise), and there are a few well-lit shots of food porn.
Right after this, she breaks the dome, because his manly interference with her personal space means she can’t move her arms enough to finish a dish. Ah, romance!
But the food largely disappears as soon as Nick shows up, which tells you all you need to know about how this film is constructed, and is a living warning that adaptations can go horribly wrong. The blindfolded-sauce-tasting scene in Mostly Martha was Mario’s attempt to connect to Martha using a language he knew she was comfortable with. Obviously that doesn’t translate here, which takes the scene from “vaguely treacle” to “instant diabetes”.
Tastes like saffron, white wine, scallions…
Tastes like tongue and yesterday’s basil pesto. Next?
It really makes me sad that this whole thing was so badly handled. The idea that a charismatic and talented male sous-chef is a threat to a female chef’s kitchen has merit; a third act in which she hears he’s been offered her job and (logically) gets angry actually makes more sense to me than Mostly Martha’s last-minute Italian dad scenario. Unfortunately, she’s treated as a hysterically overreacting couch-fainter over it, until she goes to Nick’s place to apologize for him being offered her job behind her back (…I see), at which point their relationship is repaired, and all she has to do to be happy is quit her job!
Man, I miss food movies about food.
By movie’s end, everyone ends up just as they should:
Cooking in an open kitchen in an insufferable Soho bistro, utilizing child labor to keep overhead low.
Next time on Fair Food Fight Films: a movie that’s better than this one. (Statistically speaking, it would be hard to find one worse.)
Please note: I would never actually suggest anyone sit through this film; luckily, this trailer has most of the anviltastic symbolic dialogue already in it, so you can suffer for two minutes instead of ninety.
Mostly Martha is a great film, why do they always try and re-make films that should be LEFT ALONE?