Food takes a star turn as metaphor and cultural touchstone in these films recommended by Bentley’s Samir Dayal. The professor of English and media studies has specialties in international film and culture, South Asian studies, and the cultural effects of globalization.
Babette’s Feast (Denmark, 1987)
This quiet film by Gabriel Axel richly rewards repeated viewings. It tells of two sisters’ devotion to their religion and their strict minister father — a devotion that requires surrendering prospects for ordinary domestic bliss. Babette who opens a window on another, impossibly different world. Through her efforts, the pleasures of food are multiplied by subtler pleasures of community, restrained emotion and unrequitable love. It’s also the story of one blowout meal.
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (England, 1989)
Deliciously dark, Peter Greenaway’s film forges art out of cruelty, violence and sex — motifs embodied in menacing restaurateur Albert Spica. Yet the film’s main concern is the life force: love, human connection, food. The characters play out their intimate drama almost entirely within a restaurant, whose baroque scale matches the director’s obsession with art and with the symbolic and materially sustaining power of food.
Like Water for Chocolate (Mexico, 1992)
Based on a cookbook-novel of the same name, the film by Alfonso Arau is faithful to the Latin American tradition of magical realism. Tita is frustrated at every turn by her mother and a family custom that dictates a youngest daughter does not marry until her mother’s death. In despair, Tita discovers a compensatory ability to infuse emotions into the food she cooks, with sometimes exquisite and sometimes alarming effect on those who consume it.
Soul Kitchen (Germany, 2009)
Turkish-German director Fatih Akin focuses on the minority or immigrant ethnic experience in modern Germany. Food is unique in how it connects people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds who would otherwise find little reason to interact. Akin’s fictional alter-ego is Zinos, who runs the “Soul Kitchen” — a contact zone that brings together a cross-section of Hamburg society over food and drink.
The Lunchbox (India, 2013)
This film about a growing bond of sentiments avoids sentimentality by filtering emotion into food. It presents the unlikely pairing of a widowed and soon-to-retire accountant and a young woman hoping to reclaim her husband’s attention. Director Ritesh Batra also presents a fine example of a business model: a food-delivery system in Mumbai that earned “six Sigma” status, with a vanishingly small failure rate.
Samir Dayal is a professor of English and Media Studies at Bentley.
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