Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 21 May

Délicieux (Besnard, 2021)

I’ve just sent away my French Film Festival preview to the RNZ website but it got me thinking about past festivals and whether any of the good stuff can be found online.

Luckily, some are.

From June 2021, here’s my review of a foodie’s delight:

On a lighter note, Délicieux glories in food but not the kind that you or I can make. In fact, you’d be a bit doubtful that even Chef Manceron (Grégory Gadebois) can actually make the delights his rudimentary 18^th century peasant kitchen can conjure up. It doesn’t matter though because the glossy fantasy of a cook’s redemption is extremely easy to digest.

Manceron is head chef to the Duke of Chamfort at a time when the aristocracy were at their most indulgent and, in fact, riding for a fall. When a new invention – truffle and potato tartlets – embarrasses his boss (no one eats anything that’s been dug out of the ground, his pompous guests say), he gets the boot and returns home to his country post house and resolves never to cook anything decent for anyone again.

When the mysterious Isabel Carré turns up demanding to become his apprentice he offers only short shrift until his teenage son persuades him that they might be able to serve home cooked meals to the many travellers who pass by. In short, they invent the restaurant and help to democratise food at the same time as the fall of the Bastille signals the beginning of the democratisation of France.

I didn’t believe a word of it but that didn’t get in the way of my enjoyment. There’s plenty of twists and turns but it’s the food that you will remember.

Also, featured in that festival preview: Bertrand Tavernier’s My Journey Through French Cinema and the barely French The Man in the Hat (set in France but directed by an Englishman and starring an Irishman).

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Where to watch Délicieux

Aotearoa: Streaming on Māori+

Australia: Streaming on SBS On Demand

Canada: Streaming on Club Illico (whatever that is)

Ireland: Not available

USA: Streaming on Prime Video, Peacock or Roku

UK: Digital rental from Apple or Amazon

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Further reading

Not written by me today, but here are two articles I’ve been reading recently that you might be interested in.

Firstly, Devan Scott from Filmmaker Magazine goes into some quite useful detail about why the films and TV shows we watch at home are too dark and too hard to hear.

Yes, some of it is down to how we set up our screens but a lot of it is the responsibility of the streaming services and the filmmakers themselves. Everyone needs to play a part to make home viewing better.

These characteristics mean that films aimed at theatrical audiences tend toward a wide dynamic range in audio levels: Dialogue might be leveled at a regular speaking volume, but an explosion or brass blast might be orders of magnitude louder. Contributing to this phenomenon is the expanded latitude of digital soundtracks. Before the advent of digital sound, optical tracks featured relatively limited dynamic range. Since the transition toward digital soundtracks in the 1990s, the possibilities for dynamic range in soundtracks have led to something of an arms race. As Mangini describes, “The score’s just doing this incredible thing. But wait a minute, I can’t hear what they’re saying! So, you raise the dialogue up. Now, somebody says they can’t hear the guns anymore. The sound effects come up. Now, the music has to come up. You end up trying to top yourself.”

Illuminating.

And for those of you who read my review of Alex Garland’s Civil War a few weeks ago – and engaged me in some debate here and elsewhere – here is a piece from today’s Washington Post by photojournalist Louie Palu telling us what the film gets wrong about being a photojournalist in a conflict:

As the photographers — a jaded veteran played by Kirsten Dunst, and the young woman, played by Cailee Spaeny, she reluctantly accepts as a protégée — the two main characters focus on covering shooting up close, as though that’s the most important aspect of what we do. It is not only what the photojournalists photograph, but also what they don’t, that rings false. When the two spend a night in a displaced-persons camp, neither character raises her camera to document what’s around them, ignoring the civilian victims of the war.