Depending how you count, Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros is Wiseman’s 46th film, released in 2023 when he was 93 years old. Not only does he show no signs of tiring, the film is right up there with his very best, as engrossing a four hour film as you’ll ever encounter, both innovative and meaningfully connected to his previous work. Set in the milieu of French fine dining, the film rather unexpectedly reveals itself to be as much about art, obsessiveness, and a concern for food beyond the bounds of three star Michelin restaurants. The Trosgrois chefs, the father Michel and his sons César and Léo, run a trio of restaurants, and family is also involved in an adjoining hotel and an inn. Were that not enough, they also run a food truck serving sandwiches in their small town’s plaza. These enterprises become the nexus which Wiseman utilizes to explore his customarily broad range of interests.
Because it operates here at such an advanced level, this is a good opportunity to look at how processes play a central role in Wiseman’s films. Showing how things work is something that has long been an interest in documentary films. Since Nanook cut a hole in the ice to catch a fish, seeing the ingenuity behind how tasks get accomplished has held a long fascination for filmmakers and viewers. Showing how literally the sausage is made, a play is produced, a feat is accomplished. is at the heart of what non-fiction films explore. In Wiseman’s case, we can see this operating at several levels. Given the range of his body of work, we could certainly say that together they explore how society functions. This is the time capsule quality of his work, that together they offer an exploration of the pieces, especially governmental and cultural, which can be seen as a record of how life is lived during this now over fifty-year period. Especially because of his interests in institutions and specific locales, these together paint a portrait of our times. But that portrait is comprised of a series of examinations of how things work, how they are put together, what they do.
On the level of individual films, there are several interests that make processes all the more important. First, he’s going to present components of how an institution or locale functions, and that means exploring those pieces and how they relate to each other. These are especially analytical tasks because they are not based upon conventional notions of storytelling such as telling a story chronologically or following a limited number of people. Wiseman’s films are themselves processes, because he’s allowing us to follow his possibilities for connecting the pieces he’s presenting. The second interest that makes processes essential to his work is his obsessive ability to show in great detail what he’s selected to explore. One example of this has been my almost joking at times about the way medical procedures are presented. (Think Primate, Racetrack, and Zoo, just for some of the animal cases.) He’s going to show every step of an arduous process that’s often difficult to watch, and his camera is going to capture what’s happening up close and unblinkingly. And rather famously by now, he’s going to present these activities at whatever length he feels is necessary.
Another component of this is his interest in what goes on behind the scenes, which are part and parcel of the idea of process. He wants to look at the stuff we don’t realize has to happen for us to see the public face. Whether it’s a zoo or a university, a ballet company or a city government, there’s lots going on behind the scenes that takes a dogged filmmaker to seek out and patiently explore.
So, getting to Menus-Plaisirs, a major part of why it’s so fascinating is that it’s difficult to think of another film so caught up in offering multiple levels of interconnected processing, from how a restaurant works, how fine dining dishes are conceived, executed, and presented, how families interact and carry on traditions, how foods are grown and developed. And of course it’s all done in that style which he has so fully developed - long takes, frequent close-ups, a full range of component parts themselves closely examined, and the continual sense that what we’re watching has levels of meaning well beyond the surface.
Even in a four hour film, one ostensibly about a restaurant, it’s quite surprising that it’s over an hour before we see any patrons seated at a table. And even that we don’t go into a kitchen for well over twenty minutes. We’ll get plenty of both before the film is over, but this is to say that Wiseman once more uses his location as a scaffolding for more ambitious interests, while at the same time far from ignoring the intricate details of what’s involved in what we could call the nuts and bolts of the operation itself. And the connections we can make between individual pieces can take quite a while to make themselves known, that a discussion about how a dish might take advantage of a certain seasonal vegetable will lead us much later to seeing that dish prepared, and later still to watching it being served, with maybe a detour along the way to a farm where that vegetable has been grown, It’s rather pleasurable that this isn’t done within a simplistic chronology of raw ingredients to cooking to finished plates. It’s all there, but within a framework that’s both more ambitious and not so obvious.
Wiseman’s obsession with process is most refined in the kitchen sequences, of which there are several in the film and which can last at least twenty minutes. Most of the time these are without dialog, and very much counter to our stereotypical impression of how restaurant kitchens function. There’s no yelling, no tyrannical head chef screaming at his underlings, no sense of chaos. If we’re expecting a Gordon Ramsay screaming about the ineptness of his underlings, this isn’t the place. In their main restaurant, we don’t even see a single flame. (My guess is that either these are broad induction cooktops or the burners are all discretely covered. The country restaurant kitchen does have some actual burners emitting fire.) The feeling is of an artisan studio with many helpers under the guidance of a chief architect. This isn’t just food being prepared. It’s small bejeweled masterworks almost too beautiful to be consumed. The temporary nature of their creations is part of the performance, though, no more fleeting than a theatrical production, and no less memorable when executed so adroitly and creatively.
Wiseman is the perfect guy to be following these kitchen processes. When a single sliver of asparagus is being placed upon a plate with tweezers, he patiently watches the one plate be arranged, and then is ready to show that a dozen plates have already been prepared the same way. Attention to detail by the chefs is more than mirrored by the filmmaker. That for long stretches the chefs work wordlessly is also impressively depicted. It’s as if we’re watching dancers or actors, artists in the process of practicing their craft with great concentration. The placement of bits of food in beautiful swirls and then equally carefully sauced becomes a visual pleasure to witness. The few bits of speech are very much on point. One chef explains an arrangement of small vegetables: “You mustn’t make a spiral. Quite the opposite. This makes a wonderful impact when it reaches the customer. It’s as though you gave the customers flowers.” Concern for the tiniest element is central to the kitchen, and clearly to Wiseman.
Wiseman has frequently paid attention to the misfit, to the person who doesn’t stick to the plan. Here, perhaps the closest we get is Michel going over the error a young chef has made in not soaking lamb brains soon enough. Besides explaining the negative effect of this error, he sits down with him and goes over the right way to do it, and then explains that the large books he has consulted, Escoffier and the Larousse Encyclopedia, will always show the way. Michel almost gets mad at one other point late in the film during another extended kitchen preparation sequence, almost comically so, when he scolds a chef: “I can’t stand this, Oscar. This is what I said this morning. There are too many snails in one pan.” He explains that the error means “they don’t get fired enough.” This feels so extremely French, and only sticks out because most of the extensive time we spend in the kitchen is watching focused and well executed work.
Wiseman’s films haven’t been entirely devoid of an interest in food. Meat, of course, is a mostly grim presentation of animal processing, much at odds with the humane practices we see here when Michel makes one of his forays away from the restaurant to visit with his suppliers, including one with a herd of pampered cows being treated very differently from their earlier brethren in Colorado. And considering the Judas goat in Meat literally leading lambs to their slaughter, our visit to a goat farm where the goats are lovingly presented as their milk is being extracted for cheese, we can’t help but see Wiseman sensitive to the contrast. Wiseman also tipped his hand about an appreciation of French food in La Comédie-Française, when he can’t pass a cafeteria without a longing look at some of its desserts, even showing a few creme brulees getting blowtorched. Prior to this film, I think his warmest appreciation of food preparation came in Belfast, Maine, when we see the entire early morning and wordless preparation of donuts by a solitary worker, from the start to the placing of his products in a showcase. It’s much simpler than anything here, but still respectful of the work involved in producing food. There might also be similar tinges of amusement at the rich not appreciating what’s placed before them in the banquet that ends Zoo, though in Menus-Plaisirs only occasionally might we feel any ridiculing of the patrons, mostly towards English speaking visitors appreciating expensive wines they likely know little about and who are quick to pull out their phones to satisfy their Instagram feeds. A surprising element of the film, in fact, is how knowledgeable and appreciative most of the customers we see are towards what’s put before them. Many are repeat customers, and some, like a retired winemaker Michel chats with at length, professionals themselves.
Surprising too in the film are the near comical lengths the restaurants go toward accommodating the food allergies and preferences of their customers. At the son Léo’s slightly more casual country place, there’s a truly amazing single shot lasting over eight minutes, as he goes over with his manager the ingredient substitutions necessary for each customer in the lunch to come. In complex dishes composed of many elements, they still figure out when a fish can be substituted for a meat or a sauce can be altered. It’s clear that each reservation holder has been fully interrogated as to their food concerns, and Léo improvises ways to respond to each, for every dish on to the desserts, when their pastry chef is brought into the discussion as to which dishes will require some alterations. They are also quite knowledgeable about their customers, noting special events, repeats, and any unusual circumstances. This unexpected thoroughness is consistent with how every step in the process of presenting food is given such considerable detailed attention. From the film’s opening visit to a local farmer’s market to the voice-over recitations over the end credits of waiters reciting the details of dishes that have been ordered, Menus-Plaisirs is awash with attentiveness and concern, where the atmosphere of rarified (and high priced) dining gives way to a sense of love for the work they do and the appreciation they offer their patrons. This puts this film well within the realm of Wiseman’s other French films (and even some of the American ones) where artistry at a high level is much in evidence and is clearly much appreciated by the filmmaker. Preparing food in this manner is very much of a piece with the creations of the actors, directors, choreographers, authors, and painters we have seen in other of his films.
And speaking of amazing single shots of considerable duration, one refinement of Wiseman’s style much in evidence is his willingness to show lengthy conversations from a single often tripod-mounted camera position. There’s a simplicity to this repeated approach that requires a master to execute. These begin early in the film, as in a conversation between Michel and his sons about fish, which are in season and how best to prepare them. The absence of any editing for over five minutes shows a great confidence on Wiseman’s part in his material. The fish shot is followed in short order by another of Michel and one son going over a plan for an asparagus dish, discussing each possible element of it. As the son describes his plan for the sauce, Michel’s response is “It’s too much, too many elements.” That same kind of thinking is reflected in Wiseman’s refusal to embellish - no change of camera angles or distance, no cutting to different positions. Both Trosgrois père and Wiseman are more than capable of embellishments in their work and the film shows many such examples of each, but both clearly know when the material is better presented just speaking for itself.
The just mentioned scene at Leo’s restaurant going over each guest’s food preferences for that day’s lunch is probably the most amazing of these single shots, over eight minutes, an eternity in material that usually has to be spliced together to make coherent sequences. Wiseman of course famously can take a year if need be to edit a film. Here it’s clear he trusts that material to speak many times without intervention. Michel is in a solid number of these. Later in the film there’s another scene of Michel critiquing a dish of kidneys, passion fruit, and sriracha, and he decides that it’s too spicy. The judgement is rendered as part of a seven minute single shot, and no part of it feels like it’s going on too long. Conversations between Michel and restaurant patrons are often presented similarly, especially in the last part of the film, when Michel discusses his eventual retirement and the passing on of the baton to his two sons. (Michel is already the third generation chef in his family, his father a quite famous innovator of nouvelle cuisine.) By now in the film, in the last hour of its four, we can only marvel at this consistent style of single camera position single shots. And mention is due to the cinematographer James Bishop, a long time Wiseman camera assistant here elevated for the first time to the chief job. He seems completely in sync with these Wiseman stylistic shifts.
I guess four hours can pack in a lot, but as you watch the film, it’s remarkable how it shifts between much talking and then extensive wordless sequences. It becomes another marked characteristic of style. The wordy parts are really wordy, like extensive descriptions and conversations between waiters and patrons, or all of Michel’s critiques and conversations. But the film can go twenty minutes in the kitchens with almost no words spoken, or take time to revel in the beauty of the local countryside. Both seem rather experimental, Wiseman seeing how far he can go in both directions and for how long.
Another seriously bold move that winds up making a lot of sense are the frequent forays outside the restaurants to their suppliers - for beef, vegetables, wine, goats milk for cheese, and what’s labelled a “cheese ripening company”. (There’s actually a sign outside saying that.) Michel is our tour guide on these, learning for himself or showing some of his staff what goes on these places. Remarkable in each is the extremely high level of obsession and care each of these purveyors demonstrates. In that way they are like Michel himself, and together they present a portrait of highly advanced French food culture. Michel is not an outlier, he himself is part of larger processes. Respecting nature becomes a big theme, one that staying inside the restaurant would not have conveyed as forcefully. When Michel tells the owner of a vineyard that what he just said was the same thing he heard from a cattle rancher, what could have been a cliche rings very true: “It all starts with the soil.” Delightful to witness is also the high level of specific expertise on display. Especially in the cheese factory, to hear of the temperature concerns and the routines of moving cheeses around is engrossing, and all these farmers and food processors are like this. We’re getting behind the scenes stuff of a high order
The title “Menus-Plaisirs” is a French play on words which can be taken as “small pleasures”. This might be an unassuming way to reflect upon the movie as a whole, an almost sleight-of-hand that takes serious subjects - family traditions and interactions, sustainable and seasonal food, the costs of fine dining, the occasional pretensions of patrons, the artfulness of chefs - and somehow still seems relaxed and comfortably reflective. It’s astonishing to think about the range of subject matter in Wiseman, that over fifty years ago he was inside an institution for the criminally insane and now he has explored another bastion of French high culture. It has become commonplace in the last decade or so, given Wiseman’s age, to think of each film as valedictory, given too the sustained great ambition of his recent films. Then this time, let’s hope there are still more to come, because this one will be hard to beat.