In “Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros,” Frederick Wiseman’s four-hour documentary about a great French restaurant, playing at Film Forum, there is a kitchen like none that I’ve ever seen: a large rectangular room with windows facing the woods; rows of stainless-steel countertops, with burners embedded in the flat surfaces; clear open air above the cooking spaces—a startling absence of ladles, pots, pans, mitts, and hoods (the high ceiling works as a hood). One further absence, and a very welcome one, too: a sweat-stained studly cook, hair enshrined in a bandanna, bullying everyone in the room.
In this airy space, everyone can see everyone else, and the young boss of the kitchen, César Troisgros, a slight, concentrated man with wire-frame glasses, controls the room with a look here and there, a quiet command, and occasionally a quick rush from one counter to another. We are about forty-five miles northwest of Lyon, in rural Ouches, where the Troisgros family runs an extraordinary restaurant called Le Bois sans Feuilles (The Woods Without Leaves). The price of the set meal, for lunch or for dinner, is three hundred and forty euros, hors boisson. (Call it five hundred euros per person with a good bottle of local wine.) Ouches! Yes, but, having seen the movie, I’m quite sure that no one is being cheated.
As always, Frederick Wiseman works against cliché—in this case, the clichés of TV cooking shows in which great food is produced by men of electrifying temperament. In the Troisgros kitchen, great food is a matter of craft, history, and dedication to an ideal, all of which may sound tediously high-minded, but which, in this movie, turns out to be thrilling. “Menus-Plaisirs” is one of the great Wiseman movies about work—the intentness and precision and quick-handed skill that produce such things as aiguillettes de Saint Pierre à l’amande, which turns out to be slices of John Dory fish, arrayed in a layered circle and dressed with a special sauce. The dishes are small and delicate, each one a complicated amalgam of traditional French cooking, Japanese aesthetics, and the practices of la nouvelle cuisine. Without anyone quite explaining it, we can see the doctrines that guide the establishment, carried out with moral fervor: cut back on cream sauces, use local vegetables, not much meat, cook things quickly in pans on high heat, keep the portions light and venturesome with a touch of acidic flavor. Working in this way, the main Troisgros restaurant has received Michelin’s highest rating, three stars, for the past fifty-five years.
Lyon is the gastronomic center of France, and, around this consecrated space, the Troisgros family has controlled one restaurant after another since 1930. At the moment, the family establishments include Le Central, in the small city of Roanne; and La Colline du Colombier, deep in the woods. Both places offer less complicated dishes (Côte de Cochon au Lassi de tomate) and less intimidating prices (fifty-five euros for lunch) than the mother ship with the wide-open kitchen. All three restaurants appear in the movie, though most of the picture was shot in Ouches. From scene to scene, we have to figure out where we are, since Wiseman, as always, tells us nothing—no explanatory titles, no maps, and no voice-over narration, either, though Michel Troisgros, the father of the kitchen master, César, explains a lot of the family lore and history to willing clients. Again, as always, Wiseman avoids tabular organization, moving instead through many scenes thematically arranged to comment on one another. What is the relation of authority to innovation? Can one honor tradition without getting smothered by it? And, also, a related question: Can the “King Lear” story ever end happily?
Frederick Wiseman turns ninety-four in January. He has been making movies since 1967—forty-seven films in all, most of them about American institutions: a racetrack, a hospital, an evangelical community in Aspen, a department store, a depressed American community in the Panama Canal Zone, an even more depressed fishing-and-canning town on the Maine coast. Has he left anything out? He actually filmed budget-planning sessions at U.C. Berkeley, not the most scintillating of milieux. A man determined to find out how things work, he has made films about city neighborhoods, retail establishments, monasteries, police forces, and night clubs.
In the early years, in such films as “Titicut Follies,” from 1967, about a facility for the criminally insane; “High School,” from 1968, on a soul-defeating public school; and the great “Welfare,” from 1975, about a New York welfare office, he dramatized American organizations that worked viciously against the people they were supposed to serve. In the left’s commentary on Wiseman fifty years ago, he was congratulated for his radical viewpoint. Lincoln Steffens with a camera! Wiseman entered an institution with a tiny crew, shot everything that interested him, captured about twenty-five feet of film for every foot in the finished movie. He took the place’s measure. The thematic elaboration, he always insisted, emerged in the editing, not in the shooting. The early films were tough and sardonic works enhanced by a poetic eye and by many nuances that the political commentators didn’t quite notice—a kind of black-comedy despair over life’s sheer orneriness, its refusal to conform to expectation.
The early political appreciation of Wiseman was inadequate, or at least limited, and he refused to be constrained by it. Even in one of his first movies—“Law and Order” (1969), a portrait of a mostly white Kansas City police force—the viewpoint was more melancholy than accusatory. The Kansas City police, at least at the time, were not so much oppressors of the community as armed servants of the last resort, attempting to intervene in situations—say, an incoherent family quarrel—that had drifted past the point of social breakdown. Watching the police make mistakes, we realized that many other institutions had failed these “clients” before the cops moved in. It was not an easy film to watch, but it challenged the anti-police cant of the time.
Even in the most tangled and unhappy places, Wiseman found noble and kindly gestures, small outbreaks of fortitude and courage—for instance, a doctor gentling a panicked elderly patient in the big-city “Hospital” (1970). Some of these moments, despite Wiseman’s refusal to comment, were packed with more emotion than one could easily handle. In “Blind” (1987), a sightless child eager to show a piece of work to a teacher climbs down a staircase, the camera following after him. It is one of the cinema’s epic journeys, and beyond heartbreak. Here was a filmmaker drawn to hard-pressing human realities impossible to summarize with an easy attitude of any sort. In trying to understand Wiseman, one drew on Dickens, Kafka, and Beckett rather than on the standard texts of social protest. He filmed the underside of an institution and its public face—the low hum of ordinary days, the sullen backwash of furious events, the torn-up betting tickets on the sticky floor of a racetrack after the race was over. In Wiseman’s hands, institutions developed a soul, even an unconscious.
Twenty years ago, he moved to Paris. He still makes films in the United States—a very benevolent portrait of a chatty multi-ethnic Queens neighborhood (“In Jackson Heights,” from 2015)—but his interests have begun to shift. There have been films about the Comédie-Française (1996) and the Paris Opera Ballet (2009) and London’s National Gallery (2014), and also a monologue film, “A Couple” (2022), in which a single actress recites Sophia Tolstoy’s unhappy journals in French as she moves around a luscious Brittany garden. The forest setting, with its lilies, frogs, and bending trees, doesn’t connect with Tolstoy’s laments, but so what? The splendor of the garden was a reward that Wiseman gave to himself and to the audience. Having stared into the abyss often enough, he now wants conditions of peace and order; he wants to film institutions that work well, especially French institutions that insist on historic continuity and also bounding artistic ambition.