I can’t even remember how many years ago it was that I showed up on a very cold, very dark, very rainy set for The Grey Fox in North Vancouver to interview the late but great Phillip Borsos for the now-defunct Toronto-based magazine, Cinema Canada .
I was putting myself through journalism school by waitressing at the also now-defunct but legendary Orestes’ in Vancouver. The Greek restaurant cum bacchanalian zoo was dubbed the longest running show on Broadway by owners Blaine Culling and Aristedes Pasparakis (yes, it was on the street of the same name). One of the regulars who was in the film industry — he probably gathered material for his work from the Orestes’ scene — suggested the magazine needed a Vancouver stringer: Why didn’t I give it a try?
Why not, indeed? The big pay off was — sit down — 10 cents a word. That’s right: research and write, for instance, a 500-word piece on Borsos and what he was doing with his debut feature film which, by the way, turned out to be a landmark for the Canadian film industry and the cocky young filmmaker who died too young, and you got a big 50 bucks.
But you also got to hang out in the long shadow of the big screen. This alone was what spurred me across Lions Gate Bridge in my rickety VW, shivering in my black vinyl raincoat, to talk with Borsos. Mercifully, he was gracious enough in dealing with a student journalist who hadn’t a clue about filmmaking in general or the Canadian film industry in particular, except that the craft service looked mighty good.
We all have in us a streak of the dramatic and a killer need for celebrity, and so with that anecdotal nod to the Whistler Film Festival, which kicks off today, I thought it only fitting to talk about food and films. Not that there’s a Babette’s Feast II or anything of the sort lurking in the wings this year, and definitely not, as already noted, that I’m even remotely expert on the film industry, although I do wield a pretty mean remote at home.
But I did attend a lecture not so long ago by Vancouver-based
Harry Killas, who shot his first film in the ninth grade and later went on to
make a spoof on
Babette’s Feast
called
Babette's Feet
, which he shot in five days.
Since it was part of a cultural
theory series on food and art, Killas was there to talk about food in film, not
necessarily the kind of flicks where food is the central motif (like
Babette’s
Feast
, or
Eat, Drink, Man, Woman
, or
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
). Rather he focused on scenes staged around meals and
eating as part of the dramatic narrative, pointing out how tricky they are to
shoot (it’s not unusual to take out a wall to get a shot right) and what kind
of dynamics and subtext might be at play.
Dinner scenes in film — and, some
might argue, in real life as well — are dramatic constructions that force
people to interact in a confined space whether or not they have any
relationship or intimacy, or any sense of community. Note the keyword: “force”.
The interesting thing is that, other
than perhaps a quick take of maybe a big iconic turkey or a nondescript green
salad being picked on by an Annie Hall-type neurotic, we never see an idealized
meal itself. That would be horrifically boring. Instead, it’s the interactions
of the people around the food that count.
So it’s dinner scene as social
commentary, and how much the director can tease out of the scene. Sometimes
that can be a lot, as with the crazed, dysfunctional family in
Little Miss
Sunshine
— a suicidal gay uncle, a
heroin-snorting grandpa, a Type A hubby and, of course, little Miss Olive and
her harried mom who, as always, tries to keep everyone and everything running
smoothly.
For even in an über-contemporary
satirical dinner scene like this, with new notions of what constitutes family
and even staging (the hand-held camera adds to the chaos), it’s still the woman
who obtains the food, prepares it, sets the table and serves the meal — who
keeps things “simmering along”. So how tired but timeless is that?
Throughout cinematic history, most
dinner scenes of family life, idealized or not, show images of a woman
working
— serving food, cooking
food — which is how the bourgeois status quo was and still is maintained. At
the centre is the father who dominates and is the prime recipient of all that
good food and service.
In Fellini’s 1974
Amarcord
— a
nostalgic, fantastical, and
quasi-autobiographical look at life in the Italian seacoast town of Rimini
during the 1930s — the traditional dinner scene takes a bittersweet twist with
an
especially poignant portrayal of family.
At the time the movie was shot, the
birth rate had dropped significantly in Italy. Oil prices and food prices
sky-rocketed. Women flooded the workforce and the pill was used for contraception
so family values, or even the possibility of children, were definitely on the
decline. And so the perfect family dinner becomes a slice of nostalgia served
with much longing. At least it is until the father yanks the tablecloth and the
carefully prepared meal to the floor in a crashing pique of rage. How many
times did Fellini witness a scene like that as a boy?
In
Meet Me in St. Louis
, released in 1944 at the height of U.S. involvement in
World War II (a
bout 16 million Americans
served in World War II from late 1941 to 1945) it’s a St. Louis family from
1903 that’s ensconced in nostalgia and idealized.
Here the dinner scene is emblematic,
representing the all-American family as the cornerstone of U.S. social order.
But the scene, in fact the entire movie, was also a dark denial of the conflict
that was happening overseas while production was underway and thousands lined
up with their tickets and popcorn and happy expectations, a conflict where
thousands of “boys next door” were being slaughtered.
I tried to think of a parallel
contemporary movie that might have a dinner scene in it and be a commentary on
what’s happening in Iraq or Afghanistan right now, and I kept coming back to
that dinner scene in
Little Miss Sunshine
,
with its take-out food carefully arranged to create the illusion of a perfect
family dinner. But nobody’s at the table, despite the mom calling and calling
and calling.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who can
sit through any movie as long as the popcorn is good.
