Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros Review: A Profound Contemplation of the Intricacies of Leisure

In Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, Frederick Wiseman settles into a three-star Michelin eatery in Roanne, France, run by a single family for generations, and unearths another of his temples of contemplation. An early scene grabs us immediately with its fine-grained texture, establishing an absorbing, quotidian-minded tempo that’s characteristic of Wiseman’s other non-fictional epics. Over the course of many minutes, we watch as La Maison Troisgros’s aging yet vigorous head chef and owner, Michel Troisgros, debates the particulars of an asparagus dish with his son and successor, César. Is the soy sauce, for umami, an element too many? Is the almond shaving superfluous? Is an elderberry reduction possible? The chefs’ eagerness for perfection feels less entitled than earnest—a striving to hone their art.

Wiseman allows this scene to unfold over a medium shot, as Michel and César sit at a table in the eatery’s dining room after hours, an enviable view of the countryside visible behind them. The scene is transfixing, in the Wiseman tradition, for its focus. In our impatient, narcissistic culture, it’s exhilarating to pare life down to the existence of an asparagus dish. No half-assing, no channel-surfing, no clicking—let’s stay here and get this one thing completely right.

We’re seeing two men at work, and the effort of corralling the ingredients toward a collective effect is of Wiseman’s greatest interest, which justifies his effrontery in allowing the scene to transpire over what feels like real time. Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros goes deeper into the minutiae of process than most other filmmakers could possibly dare. With it, Wiseman proves again to be the master poet of micro textures that speak to the macro of social infrastructure.

Michel and César aren’t speaking only of asparagus, of course. Wiseman captures their pleasure in talking as father and son as well as the strand of competition that inevitably runs through their communication. They’re elegant, likeable men who refute the stereotype of the chef as hysterical slave-driver, and so their moments of concern stand out all the more. We’re allowed to intuit that screaming at this level of operation is an absurd indulgence.

In a kitchen populated by working-class heroes looking to prove themselves, hysterics might seem inevitable, but here the chefs and other artists and technicians seem to take their brilliance as a given, seeking to coax it to its fullest expression. There’s more than a touch of class involved in the difference between these types of scenarios, then, as you can afford to be a better person when this much money flows through an establishment, and you’ve won for yourself this much respect, freeing yourself of the shackles of uncertainty and desperation.

Everything about this family restaurant is a testament to the openness that money affords, from the spacious and luxuriously underpopulated dining room, surrounded by an unbelievable view of the countryside, to a kitchen in which all physical barriers have been annihilated in the service of flow and sanity, functioning as a conservatory of food masters who suggest a blend of composer and scientist. The sophisticated feng shui of La Maison Troisgros meshes intimately with Wiseman’s beautifully lucid long takes, and the filmmaker is alive to the class tensions that separate La Maison Troisgros’s kitchen from that of a less rarefied restaurant.

Wiseman has made a career documenting class in various social systems, but he allows such differences to remain implicit. An artist himself, Wiseman is less interested in landing classist broadsides than in honoring the internal biorhythms of the realm surrounding him.

In fact, Wiseman is contemptuous of the expository spoon-feeding that mars much of cinema. In Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, he drops us in the bath, so to speak, justifying our trust in his ability to allow the bigger picture to emerge, granting us a neophyte’s view that evolves over the running time into omniscience. We hear a dish discussed and then we may see it an hour later, feeling as if we’re in the know. When the asparagus appears in particular, we feel as if we’re seeing an old friend. When Michel and César discuss the asparagus, we don’t even yet know who they are, as that information arises as we acclimate to the restaurant, just as we hear of the John Dory dish repeatedly before learning of its sculptural flower structure and green curry sauce. We meet Michel’s wife long before we’re told who she is, and when we learn of her identity another piece of this intricate familial portrait snaps resoundingly into place.

These bursts of sudden recognition animate the entire film, especially in the elaborate service sequences, which contrast the intricacy of the kitchen’s cooking and plating with the precision of the servers’ interactions with patrons. In these sequences, which are accomplished even for Wiseman, dozens of details that have been set up for us across many scenes cohere into a kaleidoscopic portrait of the rigors of the service industry. Motifs keep paying off unexpectedly, as pleasant segues are revealed to be pivotal to perhaps only the garnish on a plate.

Exposition, when it arrives, is timed so unpredictably that it comes to mean more than information. A description of the restaurant’s legacy, for instance, is delivered by Michel five minutes before the film concludes. Conventional filmmakers would’ve placed this footage up front to orient the audience, while Wiseman delays it so that it serves as a requiem for Michel’s relevancy and perhaps for the unapproachability of the experiences we’ve witnessed.

Throughout Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, Wiseman offers a suggestion of how the world could work. Michel’s restaurant is farm-to-table, and many of the film’s long and winding passages function as seminars on, say, aging farm-fresh cheese, on the cultivation of wine, on how to move cattle so that they eat grass in a fashion that complements their vaster environment. These sequences are informational in the matter of a conventional documentary, and poetic and obsessive in Wiseman’s determination to show how society can work in harmony, at least for the few. Imagine a Food Network program as overseen by John Ford and Jean Renoir and you’re closer than you’d expect to conjuring this film’s singular wedding of details with ecstatic formal beauty. Ford and Renoir would almost certainly be proud of an impressionistic reverie where restaurant workers laugh with one another while trimming flowers for garnishes.

Even Wiseman’s insert shots are poetic. Close-ups—of mushrooms, grass, fish, tomatoes, and cheese so moldy it appears to be growing a beard—suggest objects of transcendent majesty that have been frozen in time by Wiseman, who seeks to share their rapture with those of us with less means than himself. There’s the sense of 93-year-old Wiseman wanting to get it all in: to see and feel and touch and taste and share as much as he can before time defeats him.

Access to such paradises, and the breadth of knowledge and experience that they promise, may also explain in part the differences between the inspired artists at the center of Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros and the embittered folks of Wiseman’s equally unforgettable Monrovia, Indiana. Paradise and ideal social functioning, the fight for which Wiseman has documented in countless other films, do exist—even if, once again, it’s only for the few. The beauty of Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros isn’t without longing, then, or even subterranean despair.