A CHEF IN LOVE Movie Review

Les Mille et une Recettes
du Cuisinier Amoureux
The Cook in Love

Told primarily in flashback, Georgian director Nana Djordjadze's romantic epic is the story of a French chef named Pascal (Pierre Richard of The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe) whose love affair with the beautiful Cecilia (Nino Kirtadze) is rivaled in intensity only by the flavors and textures of the culinary creations he so lovingly fashions. Pascal had come to Tbilisi in the 1920s in search of recipes, but his love for Cecilia led him to stay and open a restaurant that quickly became legendary—a holy site for gastronomes the world over. Suddenly, with the communist revolution invading Pascal's idyllic setting, the great chef's traditions are forced to meet an explosive new world order—the flavors of food, love, and politics will be altered forever. A Chef in Love is a pleasant and lushly filmed romantic fantasy that gains its real appeal from neither sex nor politics, but from food. Part of a recent (and welcome) tradition of “food films” that include Tampopo, Babette's Feast, and Big Night, A Chef in Love's old world portrait of gastronomy as civilization has a primal appeal; the luscious, sybaritic food scenes are like a spoonful of sugar, making us willingly, and even eagerly, swallow the picture's occasionally labored lyricism.

NEXT STOP … Babette's Feast, Like Water for Chocolate, Tampopo

1996 (PG-13) 95m/C FR Pierre Richard, Nino Kirtadze, Temur Kahmhadze, Jean-Yves Gautier, Vladimir Ilyine, Danielle Darrieux, Micheline Presle; D: Nana Dzhordzadze; W: Irakli Kvirikadze; C: Georgi Beridze; M: Goran Bregovic. Nominations: Academy Awards '96: Best Foreign Film. VHS COL