In the scentless, flavorless language of film, the dinner table is often used as an excuse to assemble the cast: It becomes the stage for spilling secrets, for acting out ancient dramas and measuring loyalties by shifts in appetite. Take the ritual Sunday dinners in Ang Lee’s “Eat Drink Man Woman” (1994), or the freighted family gatherings in the films of Woody Allen. “What’s Cooking?” one of four food-centered movies coming this fall, tells its story of multicultural Los Angeles through four intersecting Thanksgiving feasts, their changing turkey recipes a metaphor for families struggling not to break apart.
Some film meals tip lovers into bed, and the food scenes can be as titillating or as unintentionally hilarious as the sex scenes. There was the creative use of honey in “9 1/2 Weeks” (1986) and dinner as foreplay in “Tom Jones” (1963).
Still other films explore the power of a meal to alter the course of histories big and small. This fall a 17th Century chef, a 1950s shop owner and a contemporary Brazilian immigrant find their destinies in their kitchens: In Roland Joffe’s “Vatel,” opening on Christmas Day, a three-day feast in honor of Louis XIV saves a prince and does in his chef, played by Gerard Depardieu; in Lasse Hallstrom’s “Chocolat,” opening in December, Juliette Binoche plays Vianne Rocher, who upsets a small French village when she opens a chocolate shop across from the church on the first day of Lent; and in Fina Torres’ “Woman on Top,” opening on Friday, Penelope Cruz’s Isabella chases her dreams to the United States armed only with her spellbinding cooking skills.
In some movies, changing a person’s destiny takes just a bite: Of Snow White’s poison apple, for example, or the stolen dinner candy that turns Violet into the dessert course in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (1971). It takes a weekend for four gourmands to cook and eat themselves into oblivion in Marco Ferreri’s “Grande Bouffe” (1973). And after a year of culinary seduction in “Like Water for Chocolate” (1993), Tita and Pedro’s forbidden passion is consummated over a plate of quails in a rose-petal sauce.
In that film, the director Laura Esquivel reveals the difference between fuel and enchantment when Pedro spies Tita’s naked breast while, on her hands and knees, she grinds mole. “Tita understood how contact with fire alters elements,” we are told.
Nor is a meal concocted from the depth of someone’s passionate imagination mere repast. Food in the right hands can be a kind of sorcery, and its magic can vex as well as bewitch. Tita’s tears fall into the wedding cake batter when Pedro is to marry her sister; the cake itself makes the guests weep and yearn for the love of their lives — and then vomit in the river.
Not all cooks can perform miracles, but when asked for her secret, Tita says that all things must be cooked with love. That sentiment is echoed in “Woman on Top,” where Isabella’s cooking can “melt the hearts and palates of men.” The first victim is her husband — “It was love at first bite.” But when she finds him with another woman, she leaves Bahia for San Francisco. The whiff of promise in her cinnamon-spiced coffee snakes out her open windows and finds the nose of a TV producer who gives Isabella her own cooking show. An instant success, she ends each segment with a reminder to share the cooking with someone you love: “I think it always improves the flavor of the dish.”
But if the communion of a perfect meal in the company of someone you love has a transcendent hint of the divine, the wrong dinner companion can rot an egg faster than the devil. There is hardly a scene in Peter Greenaway’s film “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” (1990) when someone is not cooking, eating or making love among the meat carcasses. The spectacle of food is suffocating, nauseating, inescapable. At the restaurant he owns, Albert (Michael Gambon) gorges himself nightly while his wife, Georgina (Helen Mirren), spies Michael (Alan Howard) across the room, a quiet man dining with a good book. Soon Georgina is leaving Albert to his prawns and stealing away to make love to Michael in the kitchen, with the aid of the sympathetic French chef. When Albert looks up from his plate long enough to be suspicious, he vows, “I’ll kill him and then I’ll eat him.”
He keeps the first part of his promise, stuffing Michael’s mouth with pages from a book. Georgina sees that he keeps the second. “Cook Michael for me,” she implores the chef. “This was his favorite restaurant!”
Gruesome as Georgina’s revenge is, it seems minor compared with that of the Roman general at the center of Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus.” In both the play and Julie Taymor’s 1999 film version, “Titus,” he invites the evil Queen Tamora to dinner and serves her her own children baked in a pie.
It is often the chef who pays the highest price for a meal that changes other lives for an evening. In “Big Night” (1996), the brothers Primo (Tony Shalhoub) and Secondo (Stanley Tucci) open an authentic Italian restaurant in a spaghetti-and-meatballs neighborhood. “If you give people time, they learn,” Primo wants to believe. Cooking is his art form, his lifeline, his religion — a higher calling not to be compromised.
A good meal can make you see what you have been missing.
The trick of seduction, it seems, has everything to do with persuading guilt and restraint to look the other way. In “Chocolat,” it’s Vianne’s ability to read her customers’ desires that causes the most suspicion, her insistence on indulging them in spite of the prevailing atmosphere of chastity and self-deprivation.
That atmosphere exists also in the remote Danish village that is the setting for Gabriel Axel’s “Babette’s Feast” (1987). After dutifully making the glop that passes for food for two old, unmarried sisters and their religious, ascetic friends, a poor, widowed French cook (Stephane Audran) decides to secretly blow her lottery winnings on an exotic meal. In the steam and glow of the kitchen, Babette stuffs quails with foie gras and truffles, tops blinis with gleaming piles of caviar. Terrified, the village folk sit down to this “witch’s sabbath” planning to save their souls by shutting off their taste buds.
But there is a pagan among the taste-no-evil townspeople: The general, a last-minute guest, who has returned to find the sister he once loved and left in rejected despair. As the villagers take tentative bites through pursed lips, the general serenades the food — “Real turtle soup! Veuve Clicquot! Blinis!” — caught in a reverie about a great meal he once had in Paris, at the Cafe Anglais. And gradually, in spite of themselves, the villagers begin to taste, more vividly than they have ever tasted.
Hearts and stomachs full, they smile and confess and forgive, their petty grievances melted. Even the general’s old broken heart is mended. “Every evening I shall sit down to dine with you, not with my body, which is of no importance, but with my soul,” he tells his long-lost love at the doorstep. “I have learned tonight that in this beautiful world of ours, things are possible.”
There is at the end of every memorable meal a kind of spiritual apocalypse, the hollow sense that one might never be romanced and seduced and satisfied in the same way again. After dinner, Babette reveals that she was once the chef at the Cafe Anglais, and the sisters bemoan losing her and her newfound fortune to Paris.
“I’m not going back to Paris,” she says. “There’s no one waiting for me there. They’re all dead. And I have no money.”
“No money?”
“All spent. Dinner for 12 at the Cafe Anglais costs 10,000 francs.”
But you’ll be poor, they tell her, stuck here making ale bread forever.
“An artist is never poor,” she tells them. The meal was as much a gift to herself as it was to them, a stolen whirl at perfection in a disappointing world.
“In paradise you will be the great artist God meant you to be,” one of the sisters says to comfort her, taking Babette in her arms. “Ah, how you will delight the angels!”
