Frederick Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros

Their sons, chef Pierre and saucier Jean, were awarded a first Michelin star in 1955; a second star followed in 1965; and the highly coveted third star has held since 1968. Working with architect Christian Liaigre, Michel, son of Pierre, and his wife, Marie-Pierre, opened Le Bois sans feuilles under a hundred-year-old oak tree in the nearby countryside in 2017. Floor-to-ceiling windows offer views of the meadows, woods, and orchards that determine the menus that Michel, now in his sixties, works out with his sons, who are preparing to take over one of the world’s greatest restaurants.

A few reviewers have pointed out that most documentarians would place Michel’s history lesson right at the front, offering viewers a little context for the scenes of meticulous food preparation, the lively conversations with farmers and cheesemakers and vintners, and the adept handling of affluent guests. But Frederick Wiseman, who has completed nearly four dozen features since making Titicut Follies in 1967, has never worked that way.

Instead, “he drops us in the bath, so to speak,” writes Chuck Bowen at Slant, “justifying our trust in his ability to allow the bigger picture to emerge, granting us a neophyte’s view that evolves over the running time into omniscience. We hear a dish discussed and then we may see it an hour later, feeling as if we’re in the know.” For Bowen, in “our impatient, narcissistic culture, it’s exhilarating to pare life down to the existence of an asparagus dish. No half-assing, no channel-surfing, no clicking—let’s stay here and get this one thing completely right.”

Wiseman is ninety-three, and as Michael Sicinski writes for Cinema Scope, he’s spent “most of his filmmaking life producing incisive documentary analyses of dysfunctional institutions and lumbering bureaucracies.” Recently, though, Wiseman been making “films that, to put it simply, display the value of human civilization and the effort needed to sustain it. His films on the New York Public Library system, the Paris Opera Ballet, the National Gallery of London, and even a modest gymnasium in Austin, suggest that all is not lost, and that human beings working with a common purpose can in fact produce felicitous outcomes.” Menus-Plaisirs is “a slow film about slow food.”

Outskirts cofounding editor Christopher Small, though, senses a “fundamental tension at play here, between the meticulous, artistic craftsmanship behind the walls of the kitchen, the performance-like precision of the waiting staff, and then the extraordinary class privilege of the diners.” It’s “impossible, at least for me,” writes Small, “not to feel [Wiseman’s] ironic gaze bearing down on these people, as well as, speaking for myself, a healthy amount of class hatred at seeing so much effort, such an Olympian amount of work, preservation, and preparation, go into dishing up a series of evening meals for the French bourgeoisie.”

For Leonardo Goi, dispatching to Filmmaker from Venice, where Menus-Plaisirs premiered, the film “is, among other things, a stupefying account of the act of creation. And while Troisgros and his restaurant remain suspiciously drama-free, Menus-Plaisirs is nonetheless shot through with anxiety. Everyone in it—from the chefs to the farmers that have long supplied the Troisgros family—speaks of their work as an anachronistic art on the brink of oblivion.”

Since March 2021, Shawn Glinis and Arlin Golden have been hosting Wiseman Podcast, a film-by-film analysis of the oeuvre, and they discuss Menus-Plaisirs in their latest—and thirtieth!—episode. Menus-Plaisirs screens on Saturday and Monday at the New York Film Festival and then heads to London and AFI Fest.