by Anthony Frajman
On the heels of his rare foray into fiction, A Couple, legendary American filmmaker, Frederick Wiseman is back at 94, with a new documentary, Menus–Plaisirs: Les Troisgros.
A fascinating, four-hour, up-close look at an esteemed, family-owned French restaurant, Menus–Plaisirs: Les Troisgros largely documents the inner-workings of the famed, three-Michelin-starred Le Bois Sans Feuilles, run by Michel Troisgros and his son, César.
For Wiseman, who has documented hospitals (Hospital), universities (At Berkeley) and galleries (National Gallery) in his storied career, his latest project began quite naturally, after a meal at the celebrated restaurant.
“In the summer of 2020, I stayed in a friend’s house in Burgundy for a month. And I wanted to invite them to a nice meal as a way of thanking them for putting up with me for a month. And I (looked in the Guide Michelin) and saw (Troisgros) was a three-star restaurant nearby. So, I made a reservation and we went there for lunch. And after lunch, César, the fourth generation came out and worked the room, as the chefs always do in those kind of restaurants. And, without having planned to do it, I sort of impulsively blurted it out: ‘I make documentaries. Would you ever consider I make a documentary about your restaurant?’,” Wiseman recalls.
“And he said, ‘let me talk to my father’. And he came back, half an hour later and said, ‘uh, why not?‘ And, actually I found out three years later when they came to Paris to see the movie, his father hadn’t been there that day. And that what he’d done was look me up in Wikipedia. And he liked what he saw. So, we said, ‘okay’. I had some meetings with him, and we had a letter of agreement.”
Wiseman has probed Miami’s Metro Zoo in Zoo (1993), Boston’s local government in City Hall (2020) and an entire New York neighbourhood for In Jackson Heights (2015). Yet, in his nearly 60-year distinguished career, he has never made a feature about an eatery. This was part of the appeal of Menus–Plaisirs: Les Troisgros.
“I had never asked a restaurant before. I had never approached a restaurant before, and as I say, I came to the Troisgros just by chance. But it was something that had occurred to me a long time ago, which I did nothing about.”
For Wiseman, who knew little about the enormous amount of energy, precision and dedication required to be a chef, prior to making Menus–Plaisirs: Les Troisgros, one of the biggest takeaways, was how much work is put into running a restaurant.
“I came away with a great appreciation. I thought they were artists, great, extremely successful artists. And, other than maybe looking at the activity in the kitchen in a restaurant that I might have been eating in, I had never spent seven weeks with chefs before, and I have an enormous admiration for their capacity to work and produce both delicious and beautiful looking results. And it is very, very hard work. It is physically demanding,” Wiseman says.
“They show up in the kitchen at seven in the morning and they go to the market at seven o’clock in the morning, and then they go to the kitchen and they work all morning, they work through lunch, most of them have finished up at about 3pm, but they’re back in the kitchen at 5, and they work till 11pm or 12. In some cases, a few of them work later,” he adds.
“So, it’s very hard work and it’s unrelenting in the sense that it’s every day.”
One of the biggest challenges for Wiseman, was the logistical issues of filming inside a hectic environment.
“The shooting in the kitchen was extremely difficult, because there were 15 people moving about, and I didn’t want to be responsible for bumping into anybody or somebody dropping something, or somebody being scalded by a pot of hot water. And they were constantly moving around, so we had to be sure that we were alert to their movements, and basically stayed out of the way, while at the same, trying to get the shot,” Wiseman says.
“Nothing was planned in advance other than the fact that I knew I was going to shoot in the kitchen, shoot in the dining room. But I had no idea what was going to occur those days. I had no idea who the guests were going to be. I had no idea in advance that Michel Troisgros, the father, was going to talk to a guest about the history of the restaurant.”
Though Menus–Plaisirs is a culinary delight, filled to the brim with delicious food, Wiseman says he was careful to focus equally on the nuance of preparation, the philosophy and the care that the restaurant has honed for decades.
“There were 15 people moving around in the kitchen, and I tried to suggest in the shots that I chose, in the way that I added them together, that their movements had a balletic, not a formal balletic quality, but they were related to each other.”
For Wiseman, who has made documentaries about the American Ballet Theatre in Ballet (1995) and one of the world’s oldest theatre companies, La Comédie Française, in La Comedie-Francaise ou L’amour joue (1996), he believes there are huge similarities between the chefs of his latest work, and the creatives he has documented previously – they all are artists.
“I think what they were creating is a work of art. It’s transitory, it’s ephemeral, but it’s a work of art, both in its taste and the way it looks on the plate, because they took a lot of time, both in preparing and cooking the food. But they took a lot of time, too, in arranging the food on the plate. So, it was aesthetically pleasing to look at. It was very similar to ballet, because ballet dancers and choreographers work extremely hard to create the movement and the story and the relationship between the movement and the music, and it’s equally ephemeral. The performance, it doesn’t exist insofar as it exists at the moment. It’s being performed. And that’s equally true of the plates that are being prepared in the kitchen.”
As he prepares to turn 95, Wiseman is currently taking a break. Yet, incredibly, he is already thinking about future projects, and can’t wait to take on a new feature.
“I like to work, I’m obsessed with working. Each film presents its own challenges and I try to do the best I can.”
Menus–Plaisirs: Les Troisgros is screening at CinefestOZ on 7 September, tix here; and Darwin International Film Festival on 14 September, tix here
