Frederick Wiseman Finds Calm in the Kitchen with Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros

Frederick Wiseman is, and has been for more than half a century now, fascinated by how the sausage gets made. Since the 1960s, he’s spent time documenting hospitals, schools, local government, cultural institutions, zoos and parks, submerging himself and us in their often arcane processes. His films are famously lengthy—his recent work has averaged around the three-and-a-half-hour mark, though he has gone as long as six—because of his granular devotion to detail. The lesser movies of his oeuvre can prove to be something of an endurance test; the better films (and that’s a far more populous category) leave you with the feeling of having properly experienced a whole new world. 

In Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, Wiseman shows us how the sausage gets made in an unusually literal sense, along with a whole host of other culinary delights. His latest odyssey takes us to France, and the restaurants of celebrated chef Michel Troisgros, which he runs with his two sons, César and Leo.

For most of the four-hour runtime, we are situated in the main establishment, La Colline du Colombier, nestled in the postcard-perfect French countryside. We spend time both in front and back of house, as well as in the immediate surrounds; a particularly charming scene sees a group of young Troisgros workers heading out into the local forest on a foraging trip in their chef’s whites, the sole woman of the group being hoisted on the tallest man’s shoulders so she can reach higher up in the tree for the fruit.

It’s an idyllic sequence; one of the most notable features of Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros is how surprisingly calm the whole business is. For decades, but especially recently, with productions like The Bear and Boiling Point, audiences have seen high-end kitchens depicted as frantic, hellishly stressful places (if you can’t stand the heat, etc…). Here though, Wiseman shows us a workplace that could—in some scenes, at least—be fairly described as tranquil. Early on, at a meeting for the hosts and waitstaff, we do see some allusions to a bullying problem, but this is never mentioned again throughout the rest of the film. What predominates instead is an air of quiet, companionable, intense concentration—from what we see, at least, everyone appears too firmly ensconced in their own hyper-specific tasks to even have the time to start arguments with each other. 

Indeed, the best sections are those lengthy times we spend in the large, airy kitchen of La Colline du Colombier, where the chefs are busy at their individual stations: Slicing and dicing and fileting, piping and glazing and searing a range of food so bewilderingly beautiful, some of it almost doesn’t seem real. As we watch these masters at work, Wiseman invites us to revel in the poetry of their expertise—and it’s mesmerizing. And speaking of poetry, there’s a lovely lyricism to the culinary language we pick up along the way (and of course, it helps that everyone’s speaking French): Quenelle, battuta, bigarade, arlettes, duxelles, zabaione, mignardise, gremolata, faisselle, rau răm. We may not be able to taste the food, but between the sights and the sounds of the kitchen, Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros is still a feast for the senses.

The least engaging segments are invariably when Wiseman strays from the kitchen to follow Troisgros and his sons on their food sourcing missions. While there’s value in observing the first part of the farm-to-table journey, in practice, these segments play like promotional videos you might see on these farms’ websites; informative, sure, but dry as a bone. You can quite easily lose yourself within the many mini-worlds of the kitchen, but 10 minutes of a farmer describing his soil-enrichment process does test the patience.

Besides the length and rigor, perhaps the other thing Wiseman documentaries are best known for is their objectivity. The director’s refusal to make himself a character in his movies, or to leave the viewer with an easily packaged takeaway, sets him apart from many of his fellow nonfiction filmmakers. As such, part of the fun of watching a Wiseman documentary is wondering whether the director is experiencing the images he’s capturing the same way we are as viewers. 

Is he also wondering why people would willingly eat brains? Is he also rolling his eyes at the pretensions at some of these wealthy diners, wafting the scent of their wine dramatically towards their noses and clumsily trying to sound like they’ve studied at Le Cordon Bleu, who are paying at least €550 for their meal? As someone who has made many films about those struggling desperately to get by, you’d imagine Wiseman might have some thoughts about the economic disparities that sit at the heart of such fine dining (in fact, it’s notable how much the dining area of La Colline du Colombier looks like it may have served as a model for last year’s ‘eat the rich’ satirical horror-comedy, The Menu).

Still, thanks to Wiseman’s studied impartiality, all of that must remain purely in the realm of inference. What we can say for sure about Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros is that, now into his seventh decade of filmmaking, Wiseman’s ability to weave unlikely cinematic magic from the artistry of process remains in as fine a form as ever.

Director: Frederick Wiseman
Release Date: October 10, 2022 (London Film Festival)

Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.