Tonight, I watched my first movie by Frederick Wiseman – his 2023 movie called “Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros”. Here is the movie trailer:

I watched the movie at Cinemateket here in Oslo, which is a cinema that I did not start to visit before December 2023, even though I have lived in Oslo since 2009.

At 4 hours long, I was worried that I would get bored during this movie. But no, I did not. It was mesmerizing. It was wonderful.

A quote from the New York Times review of the movie:

Wiseman’s approach is analytical and dialectical, and only seemingly straightforward. As is customary with his movies, “Menus-Plaisirs” doesn’t have music, voice-over narration, onscreen descriptive text, chapter titles or any other standard hand-holding. Wiseman instead uses images of specific physical spaces — the movie opens on the Roanne railway station and then cuts to its bustling, sumptuously stocked farmer’s market — that immediately establish a strong sense of place. In other words, he grounds you in the world of the movie and then, face by face, shot by shot, scene by scene, steadily fills in its details.

Source

This “sense of place” was important for me – to really get into the flow of the environment at this 3 Michelin stars facility, and how the different people who worked there behaved towards each other.

One of my favourite scenes in the film was the situation where one of the cooks had made an error, and the Chef then showed him in two different books the section he could read in those books to gain the information about that procedure. I loved it so much.

I will watch more Wiseman movies in the future.