Lost and Found Film Reviews: Haute Cuisine, Meek's Cutoff, The Past, and Romeo & Juliet

Between 2000 and 2014, I wrote a number of reviews for Amazon that have disappeared from the internet, so I have reproduced a few here. Slightly revised from the original text.

HAUTE CUISINE / Les Saveurs du Palais

(Christian Vincent, France, 2012, 95 minutes)

César Award-winning filmmaker Christian Vincent's 14th feature, Haute Cuisine, offers a glimpse into the life of François Mitterand's personal cook, presenting her as protective of her privacy and serious about her work. 

In the 1980s, the president's personal secretary offers Hortense Laborie (Catherine Frot, The Page Turner), a provincial chef, the prestigious position due to her facility with "simple cooking" and locally-sourced ingredients--though foie gras and truffles may strike some as anything but simple. 

If the kitchen staff at the Élysée Palace doesn't welcome her with open arms, Hortense forms a genial bond with her sous-chef, Nicolas (Arthur Dupont), but there's no mention of any friends or family (in reality, Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch, a divorcée, also spent a few years in America). Though Mitterand (author-turned-actor Jean d’Ormesson), values her services, Hortense leaves when she can no longer give free reign to her creativity. 

As a framing device, Vincent, who co-wrote the script with Étiene Comar (Of Gods and Men), uses her subsequent post as cook at an Antarctic research station, a potentially dramatic scenario that proves surprisingly uneventful, since the only real tension comes from Hortense's attempts to avoid a particularly persistent Australian documentarian (Arly Jover) with a pronounced Spanish accent (Vincent filmed these sequences in Iceland). 

Though acted and directed with care, these flaws apply to the film as a whole. In attempting to avoid anything too political (Mitterand's policymaking) or personal (Hortense's background), Haute Cuisine comes across as blander than its overly-respectful makers may have intended. 

MEEK'S CUTOFF

(Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2010, 104 minutes)

Meek's Cutoff, Kelly Reichardt's fourth feature and third set in the Pacific Northwest, arrives in the guise of a western. 

On the Oregon Trail in 1845, three couples travel in covered wagons with slippery guide Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood, hirsute and unrecognizable), but days pass, and water remains elusive. 

Emily (a never-better Michelle Williams, who anchored Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy) laments that "he's gotten in over his head." Meek insists that relief lies around the next corner, but that's never the case, until an alkaline lake appears. Unfortunately, it's unsuitable for drinking, so they push on.

About Meek, Emily's husband (Will Patton, also from Wendy and Lucy) wonders, "Is he ignorant or is he just plain evil?" (The fine cast also includes Zoe Kazan, Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson, Neal Huff, and Tommy Nelson.) 

The group's bond frays further when a Cayuse Indian (Ron Rondeaux of the Crow and Cheyenne tribes) locks them in his sights. Meek tries to squeeze information out of him, but he doesn't understand English. On the assumption that he's equally lost and scared, Emily tries to gain his trust by sharing food and mending a moccasin, but he keeps his distance from the settlers, leading to a showdown that produces an unexpected outcome. 

Always attuned to the rhythms of nature, Kelly Reichardt's meditative take on the genre, written by Jon Raymond, feels more enigmatic than most--with the possible exception of Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man--even if the period details look right. With her focus on faded calico dresses and vast aquamarine skies, Meek's Cutoff offers a beautiful vision of harsh times. 

THE PAST / Le Passé

(Asghar Farhadi, France/Italy/Iran, 2013, 130 minutes)

Asghar Farhadi’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning film, The Separation, takes a procedural approach to two interlocking relationships. 

When Ahmad (Iranian actor/director Ali Mosaffa, who learned French for the role) travels from Tehran to Paris, he expects to finalize his divorce from Marie (The Artist's Bérénice Bejo), so that she can marry Samir (The Prophet's Tahar Rahim), but he finds a chaotic domestic scenario: Samir's wife, Céline (Aleksandra Klebanska), is in a coma after a failed suicide attempt; their young son, Fouad (Elyes Aguis), has become difficult; and Marie's teenage daughter, Lucie (Pauline Burlet), won't speak to her. 

Marie assumes Lucie can't stand Samir, but she's actually keeping a secret that's eating her up inside. With Samir's help, Marie has also been repainting the walls of her dilapidated house, which represent the havoc within. 

Like a cross between a counselor and a detective, Ahmad starts putting the pieces together by trying to get Lucie to open up. He may not be her birth father, but she feels more comfortable talking to him than anyone else. 

As Ahmad discovers, most everyone has been withholding information about the day Céline attempted to take her life. 

By the conclusion, an undocumented worker and a restaurant owner get caught up in this absorbing, unpredictable drama, but if Mosaffa and Burlet are particularly good, Bejo and Tahar play more exasperating characters--Marie is high-strung and Samir is moody--though it's to Farhadi's credit that he would prefer to create characters who are more intriguing than loveable. 

ROMEO & JULIET

(Carlo Carlei, UK/Italy/Switzerland, USA, 2013, 118 minutes)

Of the many ways to adapt Shakespeare for the silver screen, filmmakers often choose between the Bard's original era and their own (Richard Loncraine’s 1930s-set Richard III represented an exception to the rule).

Unlike Baz Luhrmann's 1996 designer-clad American edition, Carlo Carlei's Italian-made Romeo & Juliet aims for authenticity in its tale of the Montagues, the Capulets, and the star-cross'd young couple caught up in their feud. 

Though Juliet (True Grit’s Hailee Steinfeld) is only a teenager, her parents (Natascha McElone and Homeland's Damien Lewis with a very unfortunate haircut) have arranged for her to marry the drippy Count Paris (300's Tom Wisdom). Romeo (model-handsome Douglas Booth from the BBC's 2011 Great Expectations) has also been making wedding plans until he spots Juliet at a masked ball, and all thoughts of Rosaline (Colombian actress Nathalie Rapti Gomez) disappear. 

While Mercutio (Christian Cooke) and Tybalt (Ed Westwick) try to keep the two apart, Benvolio (The Road's Kodi Smit-McPhee), Friar Lawrence (Paul Giamatti in an impish turn), and Juliet's nurse (the very capable Leslie Manville, prior to her breakout role in Phantom Thread) try to bring them together, but the hostility between the two camps ensures that all does not end well, and that's what the Bard intended, though Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes unnecessarily simplifies and condenses the text. 

Further, despite their superior work elsewhere, Steinfeld and Booth make for a tepid match, unlike the lovers, played by Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, at the heart of Franco Zeffirelli's definitive 1968 version. 

On the plus side, Gossip Girl bad boy Westwick attacks his role with such gusto that the film springs to life whenever he enters the scene--and deflates again whenever he departs. 

Images from The New York Times (Catherine Frot / Anouchka de Willencourt / Weinstein Co.), Laura's Miscellaneous Musings (Frot and Arthur Dupont), the IMDb (Michelle Williams), Rotten Tomatoes (Williams, Shirley Henderson, and Zoe Kazan and Berenice Bejo with Ali Mosaffa), The Hollywood Reporter (Bejo and Tahar Rahim), Refinery 29 (Hailee Steinfeld and Douglas Booth), and Movie Mom (Steinfeld, Booth, and Leslie Manville).