7/7/15: The Sweet Science

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Best Craftsman in France, Chris Hegedus, cooking competition, D.A. Pennebaker, dedication vs obsession, director-cinematographer-editor, documentaries, Don't Look Back, France, Frederique Lazard, husband-wife relationship, intense competition, Jacquy Pfeiffer, Kings of Pastry, Meilleur Ouvrier de France, mentors, MOF, multiple directors, pastry chefs, Philippe Rigollot, Philippe Urraca, President Nicolas Sarkozy, Regis Lazard, Sebastien Canonne, self-sacrifice, set in France, The War Room

Like many skill sets, it’s quite possible for just about anyone to bake something: with enough time, patience and resources, the clumsiest oaf among us can create baked goods that are, at the very least, edible…even if just barely. Cooking, after all, is as much about science and process as anything else: if you can understand what happens in the kitchen, there’s a good chance that you can replicate it. In theory, at least.

As with anything, however, it takes something a little extra to truly excel. While just about anyone can prepare a dish (under the right circumstances), being an artist is something else entirely. Becoming the equivalent of Picasso in the kitchen requires no small amount of dedication, self-sacrifice, forward-momentum and tunnel-vision: while there are any number of talented chefs spread across the globe, there are very few who could be considered “the very best,” the shining standard to which all other chefs aspire. The “kings of pastry,” if you will.

Veteran documentarians D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus take a look at these “creme de la cremes” of the baking world with their vibrant, thoroughly engaging Kings of Pastry (2009). The film takes a look at the ultra-prestigious Meilleur Ouvrier de France (literally “best craftsman in France”), a difficult, stressful and intense three-day baking competition that takes place every four years and draws chefs from around the world. Rather than competing against each other, the chefs attempt to prove their worth and earn the coveted “collar,” a badge of honor which becomes a lifelong calling card. Few will make it through the demanding trials and even fewer will earn the top honor: after all, there are plenty of extremely talented chefs in the world but only a few who can be considered “the best of the best.”

For the purposes of the documentary, Pennebaker and Hegedus follow around several different contestants as they prepare for, participate in and deal with the fall-out from the Meilleur Ouvrier de France (known among the participants as the MOF). We spend the most time with Jacquy Pfeiffer, an intense, driven chef who founded the only “pastry-only” baking school in America, but it’s definitely not a one-man show. We’re also introduced to Philippe Rigollot, a devoted family man, and Regis Lazard, a chef making his second attempt at the MOF after dropping one of his creations during his first go-around. Since the MOF trials are four years apart, the contestants spend the time in between honing their craft and preparing: it truly is the Olympics of baking and the chefs must give their whole lives over to the pursuit if they hope to have any chance of success.

As follow around the various chefs, we also get peeks into their private lives and the forces that guide them on their journey. Pfeiffer is the neurotic perfectionist, an artist capable of the most exquisite, delicate pastry sculptures imaginable, yet wracked by such doubt that his girlfriend, Rachel, has to call him every night and pretend that the MOF competition has been cancelled just so he can fall asleep. Rigollot is the nice-guy family man whose kids are his personal tasting judges and whose mother instilled a love of baking in him from an early age. Lazard is the underdog coming back for one last shot at glory: his long-suffering wife, Frederique, wants this to be Lazard’s last MOF attempt so that he can focus on his own business and family. With all of the forces around them, the contestants must attempt to clear their heads and focus on the task at hand.

And what a task: spread out over three days, the chefs must create 40 different recipes, ranging from ridiculously elegant wedding cakes to chocolate sculptures, sugar sculptures and lollipops. They must create razor-thin candy ribbons, work with chocolate that begins to harden seconds after its poured and fight the ravages of humidity (the enemy of sugar, as we’re told), all while under the constant scrutiny of the MOF judges and the ever-present ticking clock. Disaster lurks around every corner (setting the delicate creations down is a nerve-wracking pursuit that seems roughly equitable to juggling dynamite) and the chefs’ fragile nerves are always in danger of cracking, just like their glossy, edible art. The task is almost impossible but the reward is tremendous: the winners will receive not only personal accolades from French President Nicolas Sarkozy, himself, but life-time bragging rights as genuine “Kings of Pastry.”

Despite its bare-bones look and style (the camerawork reminds of ’90s-era PBS documentaries and the score is as repetitive and chipper as video game music), Pennebaker and Hegedus’ film is a thoroughly absorbing and fascinating peek into one of the most demanding cooking competitions out there. There’s a genuine sense of tension and drama to the film that, at times, translates to some fairly white-knuckle moments: the climatic scene involving Rigollot’s sugar sculpture is powerful and heartbreaking, two terms which are rarely equated with cooking competitions. The subjects are all likable and engaging, to boot, which really helps draw the audience in. While we end up spending more time with Jacquy, his daughter, Alex, and Rachel than we do with the others, we get enough time with Rigollot and Lazard to prevent them from seeing under-developed or like afterthoughts.

There are also plenty of nice reflections and commentary from Philippe Urraca, the head of the MOF organization. Urraca is the one who points out the (sometimes minute) separation between the “great” and the “very best,” stating how it can often just be a matter of timing: it actually took him three attempts to become an MOF and now he’s the president of the whole thing…try and try again, indeed! Urraca and the other judges seem to have genuine affection and interest in the contestants, a fact driven home by everyone’s distress over Rigollot’s last-minute catastrophe. Since the chefs aren’t really competing against each other, per se, there’s much more sense of camaraderie and fellowship than in more cut-throat competitions.

Ultimately, Kings of Pastry is a fascinating look into what it takes to become the very best chef in France, a country that is certainly no slouch when it comes to the art of cooking. Toeing the line between dedication and obsession (one contestant was on his fourth MOF, meaning that he’d been working on this for sixteen consecutive years!), Pennebaker and Hegedus show that you need to be all-in in order to become the very best. Come for the unbelievable displays of pastry (in every sense of the term, this film is hardcore, triple-X “food porn”) but stay for the genuinely involving human drama and the ultimate triumph of true believers putting it all on the line for their dreams.

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4/3/14: Our Obsession with Whine

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Bordeaux red, Bordeaux wine, Bordeaux wines, Chateau Lafite, Chateau Latour, China, Chinese wine, cinema, Cultural Revolution, David Roach, documentaries, documentary, film reviews, films, France, French wine, Movies, oenophile, oenophilia, Red Obsession, Russell Crowe, supply and demand, Warwick Ross, wine, wine snobs

In this modern world, anything and everything is a commodity merely waiting for its net value to rise. We’ve collected stamps and baseball cards for generations, put a premium price on nostalgic doodads and turned comfort foods into gourmet cuisine. We’ve even found a way to put a physical dollar value on video-game gold: that’s both terrifying and awe-inspiring, the surest monument to price-tag culture that ever existed. Wine, as a commodity, is nothing new: wine connoisseurs and expensive bottles of vino have existed for centuries. In all this time, the Bordeaux region of France has maintained a reputation as the go-to for discerning American and European collectors. When American interest in Bordeaux red began to wane in 2009, however, the French vineyards found themselves courting an entirely different clientele: the Chinese. The recent documentary Red Obsession details what happens when this new interest drives prices in Bordeaux wine to unprecedented levels, setting the stage for one helluva roller coaster ride. What goes up, however, must always come down…and no obsession lasts forever.

The film begins with a picturesque sweep through the grape fields of Bordeaux, a region of France where the inherent weather conditions create grapes like none other in the world. From here, we meet a small mob of vineyard owners, oenophiles and wine critics, while introduced to wines where “the key ingredient is love.” We also learn that “a good wine drills down into your psyche, into your perceptions,” so it should be pretty obvious that we’re into some pretty heavy-duty praise here. In fact, the first 15 minutes of the film come across as nothing more than a beautifully shot advertisement for Bordeaux wines. In time, however, the documentary settles into its main focus: the changing cultural popularity of Bordeaux reds.

When American purchases of Bordeaux red bottomed-out in 2009, wine makers looked towards the nouveau riche of China as a way to keep their industry afloat. Currently in the midst of a massive economic upswing, China was sitting on lots of new wealth and, in short order, became the biggest importers of Bordeaux wine. As the documentary points out, much of this had to do with the disparate views Chinese and French society had regarding Bordeaux wine: for the French, red wine was old hat and lost its novelty factor centuries before. The Chinese, on the other hand, were new to the grape wine game, having institutionalized spirit wines for generations. New is always exciting, of course, and the Chinese took to their new past-time with a rare zeal.

The problems begin, however, when Chinese demand for Bordeaux red pushes prices into ridiculously inflated territory. As the bubble gets bigger and bigger, saner heads begin to worry about the inevitable pop: all trends must end and the over-reliance on Chinese interest in Bordeaux red seems like a sure-fire recipe for disaster. It’s not spoiling much to say that the whole thing does, eventually, burst, although how much responsibility Chinese Bordeaux wine consumers hold in this is certainly up for debate. The documentary hints at a happier outcome, in a way, when it mentions the inherently cyclical nature of the wine industry: what goes up must come down and what is now down will eventually be back up…it’s just the nature of the grape.

I’m always interested in documentaries that purport to teach me about a subject I have no knowledge of, particularly if it’s something I’ve never really thought about. As someone who spent his drinking years as a beer and liquor guy, wine was never really on my radar (unless the beer and liquor was gone, of course). I’ve never had the money to collect it and only know a handful of people who drink it, so I’ve never really given wine much thought. Supply-and-demand economics, however, are always interesting to me, especially when they involve super powers like China. Even though I don’t have a horse in the race, as it were, it was quite interesting to note the effect that Chinese interest on Bordeaux wine had not only the fortunes of that particular region but the entire wine industry. The filmmakers help keep my attention thanks to some truly beautiful cinematography (to be honest, you’d have to be a complete dunce to make those gorgeous locales look like anything less than modern Gardens of Eden) and the film is well-paced, once one gets past the rather painful first fifteen minutes.

The biggest problem I had with the film is the decidedly anti-Chinese “hysteria” that seems to inform not only some of the “talking head” interviews but also some of the documentary’s subtext. There often seems to be an unspoken condemnation involved here, some collective thought that the Chinese are solely responsible for the Bordeaux wine growers current situation. To my mind, the Bordeaux growers seem to be a classic case of putting all of one’s eggs into the same basket, however, and the anti-Chinese sentiment seems more like a personal bias than any sort of well-reasoned argument. This isn’t helped by the fact that we’re introduced to characters like Peter Tseng, a ridiculously wealthy Chinese billionaire who comes across as a bit of a human Scrooge McDuck. There’s also quite an emphasis on the Chinese counterfeiting of Bordeaux wines, although I would be hard-pressed to recall if they mentioned any other bootlegging besides the Chinese: the absence of any other mentions strikes me as the slightest bit disingenuous but I honestly don’t know enough about the subject to make a call one way or the other. Suffice to say, I caught enough of an occasional anti-Chinese air to the proceedings to feel more than a little conflicted at times.

While Red Obsession is an interesting documentary, it’s far from a great or illuminating one. While the subject-matter and cinematography are always interesting, the film ends up being a little too limited in scope to be truly relevatory. For anyone who has an interest in either the wine industry or the symbiotic relationship between Western-Eastern economies, the film will provide a fairly brisk view. At the end of the day, I can’t help feeling that at least a little of the responsibility for the Bordeaux crash has to do with the fact that prices rose by 1000% in a ten-year time-span: a love of Bordeaux red might be in the blood but those growers might be hard-pressed to squeeze any more blood out of their collected turnips.