Foodie Film Favorite - Marie Antoinette

We were recently asked what our favorite food scenes from movies are - and somehow, this hostess drew a blank.  Of course, the next day we were reminded of so many scenes that make our mouths water - not only from the delicious food styling, but also the amazing costumes and cinematography.

Our research on Poufs a la Jardiniere reminded us of one of our favorite movies - Marie Antoinette directed by Sophia Coppola.  A delicious film indeed - a story about a girl, a queen, who likes to play cards with her friends, shop, and eat petit fours - what girl doesn't?

The Life.

  

We were obsessed with this film when it came out - the gowns of satin and silk, tall coiffures, the saturated colors, and of course - the gorgeous food.  We adore the banquet scenes with carefully arranged asparagus, lush cakes and jellies, candied orange peels, mini bites of cream topped with berries and pistachios, all served on gilded and hand painted china.  Swoon.  

Without further ado:

Ah yes, sweet decadence.  Too bad all this extravagance ended in the beheadding of Ms Antoinette.  None the less, this hostess sure wishes she was there in Versailles to drink champagne, eat delicious cakes, and gamble with the girls.  


One last lust worthy video that is sure to make your mouth water! After all, who doesn't want candy?

Roasted Quail, Gripping Existential Crisis On The Side

Hello dear readers! Happy new year and welcome back to Miss Ariadne's regularly scheduled programming: a discussion of food in my favorite films. If you have any film suggestions, please leave a comment or email me at missariadneax@gmail.com! Now on to the main course - today's film: My Dinner with Andre.

Made in 1981, My Dinner with Andre at first glance offers a premise that feels entirely uncinematic. Two men at dinner, talking. That's it. It's the kind of 3-minute exercise you make your first year of film school to learn about shot-reverse-shot. It's not really material for a 2-hour long feature.


Well, luckily for us, French auteur Louis Malle didn't agree. And while 90% of the film is just two actors sitting at a table, his shots are precise, concise and perceptive. Every reflection is captured and interpreted, every bit of behavior meaningful: furtive glances with a very funny, very hostile waiter, the chewing (!) of soup, a flurry of hand gestures. As with much great filmmaking and photography, the longer you look at a shot, the more it has to tell you. In this way, Malle takes a simple, unassuming idea and turns it into a deeply engaging, often heartbreaking tête-à-tête between two artists examining the world they live in and the way they live in it.

However, this hostess is willing to bet even a film school exercise would be captivating if the dinnermates in question were Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn. The script was developed and written by the longtime friends and collaborators and you can tell. The dialogue is specific, funny, intelligent and unembarrassed.

Wallace Shawn in The Princess Bride.

Wallace Shawn is most recognizable in popular culture for his roles as Vizzini in The Princess Bride - the little guy running around lisping "inconcievable!" - and as lovelorn debate teacher Mr. Hall in Clueless. His life's work, however, is in the theater as a sometimes controversial playwright - a role he plays in the film as well. At the film's outset, he tells us how he's about to go have dinner with a man he's tried to avoid for years, the man who gave him his start in the theater - Andre Gregory, a theater director, in the film as he is in life. (Though it is often said that the characters are autobiographical, Shawn and Gregory always reject this idea, saying if given the opportunity they would make the film again, each playing the other's role.)

And so theater with a capital T is the jumping-off point for a bewitching conversation about how to live. They quickly dispense with the ordering of food - to start, terrine de poisson for Gregory, a hearty potato mushroom soup called bramborova polevka for Shawn, and roast quail with raisins for the both. But let's be serious. This is not a film about food. This is a film about how thought provoking and challenging dinner conversation can be - something that feels like a forgotten art form nowadays.

Shawn is a pragmatist who believes in the simple pleasures of life. An electric blanket, for example, on a cold New York night, is a very pleasurable, comforting thing. Gregory argues the opposite. He says "I wouldn't put on an electric blanket for any reason. First, I'd be worried if I get electrocuted. No, I don't trust technology. But I mean, the main thing, Wally, is that I think that kind of comfort just separates you from reality in a very direct way."

Andre Gregory. NOT in The Princess Bride.

Having recently returned to "normal" life from a variety of what he calls "experiences," Gregory plays Quixote to Shawn's Panza. While not so foolish as the fictional caballero, Gregory, years earlier, abruptly abandoned his successful life as a director and disappeared from the theater community. He tells Shawn how a friend found him weeping in the street after seeing the Ingmar Bergman film Autumn Sonata, in which a classical pianist played by Ingrid Bergman (in her final film performance) says: "I could always live in my art, but not in my life."

He then tells Shawn about how he's spent the past few years, aggressively pursuing a way of life that verges on the fantastic. He spends the first hour of the film talking almost nonstop about his experiences being buried alive on Halloween night in Long Island as part of a performance art piece, talking to insects at a Scottish eco-village/spiritual community, being "baptized" by Polish actors in woodland paradise and speaking and communing with mythical creatures, most notably a bright blue creature with violets growing out of its eyelids and and poppies growing out of its toenails.

He talks about how these experiences led him to feel that there is no way to live but uncomfortably. To live by habit and comfort is to not be living at all...a notion Shawn, while captivated by Gregory's stories, completely rejects.

I'm sure a lot of this sounds a little cerebral and, for my taste, it normally would be. But as Roger Ebert correctly says about it, "it should be unwatchable and yet those who love it return time and again, enchanted." He's right. After seeing the film for the first time, I wanted to download it into my brain and carry it around with me, thinking and rethinking about the questions it poses about living a creative life.

On the Criterion Collection - oh, Criterion, I love you, but really, no Almodovar? - you can see a conversation between Noah Baumbach and Wallace Shawn, 30 years after the making of My Dinner with Andre and also, a short trailer. But these are just appetizers, don't skip the meal! Rent it, buy it, stream it, but watch it. Because let's face it. On a wintery night, nothing is better than a warm dinner, endless wine, and mindblowing, thought-provoking conversation.

Fun fact: in Waiting for Guffman, Corky St. Clair sells My Dinner With Andre figurines. I wonder where we can get our hands on some...

First ten minutes of the film here:

A Kitchen That Bakes The Cake For You

Have you ever seen the 50's motoroma ads, those glorious time capsules of ? At last night's Piglet Party thrown by Food52, Christine Muhkle, New York Times T Magazine’s official food editor and "de facto concierge", and Luise Stauss, photo editor of the New York Times Magazine, put on a slideshow of food through the 20th century, including this 1956 GM ad of a woman being swept off her feet not by her dapper top hatted gent, but by the modern convenience of a cake-baking kitchen. Where can we get one?

My favorite line from "Eat Pray Love"

From Liz Gilbert's new Italian landlady,

"All you American girls want is pasta and (wink, wink) sausage."

Isn't that the truth? Someone, please, whisk me away on an Italian vacay.

Wonderland: "A cacophony of flavours entering your mouth"

At the UK press conference for Tim Burton’s highly anticipated Alice in Wonderland being released this Friday, March 5, Anne Hathaway indicated that Nigella most-beautiful-woman-in-the-world-Lawson, inspired her portrayal of the off-kilter White Queen. “Nigella's always talking about 'a cacophony of flavours entering your mouth'. I wanted to give [the White Queen] that sensuality in the kitchen." She has a full-blown kitchen scene, in which she cooks a magic potion using only her amputated fingers.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times Burton said, "I quietly had her as my image for this character... She's really beautiful... but then there's this glint in her eye and when you see it you go, 'Oh, whoa, she's like really... nuts.' I mean in a good way. Well, maybe, I don't know."

We’ll see you at the IMAX for what will certainly be a trippy ride with an incredible cast of characters: Burton cast Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, and the relatively unknown Mia Wasikowska as Alice. Alan Rickman is the blue caterpillar, Michael Sheen (who we loved in Frost/Nixon) is the White Rabbit.

Strap in your boots, and hold onto your butts.

Without further ado, a clip from the tea party scene, followed by the full-blown trailer:

...

Food On the TV

Sometimes all we need is a little humor and a little perspective to get us through a blah Tuesday. We recommend the new single by Charlotte Gainsbourg featuring Beck, from her forthcoming album IRM due out January 26th. The video is directed by Keith Schofield and, well, it's delightful, and completely strange all at the same time.

A few of our favorite moments:

Charlotte Gainsbourg - Heaven Can Wait from Charlotte Gainsbourg on Vimeo.

That Fox is Just Fantastic

Dear readers,

Lest you begin thinking that your hostesses at Gastronomista are overly obsessed with the golden days of Hollywood, we would like to dispel all such suspicions now and freely admit: we are lovers of cinema, period. Old and new, good and bad, great and sometimes, terrible. And if it's got great food, well... if you don't know us by now, dear readers, you never will.

So, we bring you our first still-in-the-theaters edition of Hasta La Feast-a: Fantastic Mr. Fox



One of our favorite books growing up is now one of the most fun movies in wide release right now. When a book makes an 8-year-old curious about washing down a goose paste filled donut with hard apple cider, I dare say the author's done a pretty bang-up job of making your mouth water with the written word. It's something we ladies at Gastronomista strive for daily, and Roald Dahl's gifts in that department weren't stale chips. Reading Boy: Tales of Childhood, we yearned for freshly poached, brilliantly spotted flounder. Reading Matilda we pined for Ovaltine and fried tomatoes. And who, reading The BFG, hasn't been at least mildly curious about the taste, and promised side-effects, of frobscottle?
This was, of course, in no small part due to long time Dahl illustrator and cohort Quentin Blake, whose fantastically whimsical line drawings helped bring Dahl's story to life.
Have you ever seen a fox more overjoyed? And Fantastic Mr. Fox is not only a fantastic book, but boy has it got some fantastic food. Director Wes Anderson has stuck to the spirit of the thing even while adding his own touch, and the result is simply the most delicious film of the year. (sorry, Julie and Julia.)


Hungry after the movie? Maybe some scrambled dregs will hit the spot.