THIS IS NOT A MEAL! Calgary International Film Festival’s Screening of Gereon Wetzel’s Documentary, “El Bulli: Cooking in Process”

THIS IS NOT A MEAL!

Documentary, El Bulli: Cooking in Process;
Gereon Wetzel, Filmmaker.

by Simone Keiran

♫ A law was made a distant moon ago here:
♪ July and August cannot be too hot. ♫

Overlooking a half-moon cove called Cala Montjoi, near Roses, along Spain’s lush Costa Brava, there was once a restaurant open only six months of the year. They accepted reservations one single day out of the entire year and, yet, filled every available space. The white-washed adobe building with floor-to-ceiling windows floated cloud-like under towering arbutus on a cliff with stunning views of the warbly mermaid-filled Mediterranean.

♫ And there’s a legal limit to the snow here … ♪♫

For twenty-four years, it offered increasingly hybridized and Michelin-starred meals of 29-39-49-59 … courses, until it finally culminated in the final 39-course ensemble of highly specialized taste plates: foams, spheres and sands made of food; food transformed into non-food items like frozen mint lakes, tobacco-flavoured blackberry ice cigarettes, pea film; deconstructed dishes reassembled into their essential elements, including a martini that involved a chef squirting gin and vermouth from an atomizer into a mouth smeared with a half-masticated olive shaped-sphere of reconstructed olive paste. A whole chef, his entire faculties and training honed through years of experimentation, squirting, squirting, squirting, not to mention the teamwork required to mangle-ize all those olives, take out the pip, then somehow re-blorpify them into those special spheroidical sacs that resonated with its original olive shape.

The Chef de Grand High Poobah decreed that all food served therein henceforth should be declaréd magical.

♫ The winter is forbidden ’til December
♪ And exits March the second on the dot. ♫

It employed a young man full-time whose only apparent role involved running a leaf rake over pea gravel from one end of the compound to another. Raking, raking, raking. Back and forth and back and forth. When he could’ve spent his summer juicing sweet potatoes!

Gereon Wetzel, the filmmaker who made El Bulli: Cooking in Process, captures this Zen Monastic fervour so well.

♫ By order, summer lingers through September … ♪♫

With its high-definition focus and brilliant lighting, there is much that is The Hard, Clear Light of Day going on in this documentary.

It begins with a soft-focus dreamlike, slo-mo seqence at the end of the season, though, while countless chefs and sous-chefs and chefs-de-maitre and chefs-de-cuisine fuss and fret over itty-bitty morsels, sprinkling a dibby-dab here and wiping a dauby-dib there. I’m not gifted with that special spectrum of autism which allows me to quantify vast masses in one sweeping blink, but there must’ve been nearly a dozen hovering over each table, and there were three tables, not to mention the stoves, the refrigerators, the machine console banks, the pantries, the rafters ….

♫ The rain may never fall till after sundown.
♪ By eight, the morning fog must disappear. ♫

In film time, El Bulli is closing for the year — its sorceror’s apprentice stores of foamimajigs, spheroididgets, juicimagogs and pulvericizors wrapped in octo-layers of cling films and shelved, as Chef de Maitre, Ferran Adrià, and his team of Head Chefs scoot off to an atelier in Barcelona to conduct controlled* experiments on food for the next six months.

*If by ‘controlled’, one means ‘tasting what happens’ after Adrià drops, for example, a transparent pouch of sweet potato-flavoured goo encased in special Japanese medicinal paper into a glass of …’ I forget, maybe something blibbery, maybe tap water.

Wetzel’s focus is so sharp that, even though in this one scene Chef de Cuisine Albert Raurich never raises his fingers to his lips, you can actually see him gnaw straight through his manicure in anxiety as he reports to Adrià that — wurra! wurra! wurra! — carbonated water, instead of ordinary flat tap water, was accidentally poured into an oil and water cocktail. Oil and water, yes, because the other Chef de Cuisine, Oriol Castro, decreed that the oil felt so silky against the lips. Later in the season, a macadamia nut and some blackberry spheres are dropped in, probably because customers gave them The Look.

Wetzel homes in so acutely that, when Other Brother Darryl’s harddrive crashes and there is no third backup disc (as the second one is at the computer repair shop with the technician), instead of using the mere hard copies that were printed out on — gasp! — reams of paper, we watch as Adrià chews off the guy’s balls. Poor things shrivelled right there, fell off with a mystical plop and scampered away. (Not to worry, however, they were probably rounded back up, marinated in a vacuum bag of juiced calf cartilege, and served up with a tartare of street urchin.)

Watch as the El Bullistas take their early morning stroll through the market. The shot utilizes a longer-distance lens and microphone. This could’ve been deliberate, in order to let the documentary recording process remain discreet and the conversations candid, but I suspect it also kept the camera operator at a safe distance in case the grocers started flinging their food, like chimpanzee poo, in frustration.

Watch as the green-grocer is asked to bag up three grapes.

Three. You read it correctly.

“Okay, make it four.” Raurich concedes with a huff when the grocer gives him The Look.

Impudent chit, what was she thinking!

“And three green beans.”

What Wertzel’s camera did not capture is how, for the past ten years and in spite of charging each customer a flat-rate of €250 per sitting, El Bulli was not a financial success. It was only through book sales, that Ferran Adrià managed to keep his venture afloat. It closed its doors for good, this summer …

♫ If ever I would leave you, it wouldn’t be in summer.
♪♫ Seeing you in summer I never would go. ♪♫

… although El Bulli’s reincarnation as a “Creative Centre of Tapas” is presently in gestation.

Okay, okay, okay, so it would be a shabby, impoverished world indeed, if the success of all such ventures were to be measured by net dollars — even if the rest of us Shuvs and Zuuls would’ve had to shell out that €250 per sitting, regardless, and consider it a bargain!

And there was something about Ferran Adrià’s food that made so many people tingly in their tummies that it spawned a worldwide shift in cuisine.

He is taken so seriously and takes himself so seriously that he actually took the opportunity to dogpile onto his existential futility with a bunch of other chefs (René Redzepi, Michel Bras, Alex Atala, Gaston Acurio and Dan Barber) and give birth to a Chef’s Manifesto.

It included these eyepopping extracts:

“We dream of a future in which the chef is socially engaged, conscious of and responsible for his or her contribution to a just a sustainable society … through our cooking, our ethics and our aesthetics, we can contribute to the culture and identity of a people, a region, a country … we can also serve as an important bridge to other cultures … we all have a responsibility to know and protect nature.

— unleashed at a fat-cat G-9 Summit without the slightest trace of irony, in Lima, Peru, no less, renowned for its large population living at subsistence level.

♫ And could I leave you, running merrily through the snow?
♪♫ Or on a wintry evening, when you catch the fire’s glow? ♪♫

His defenders are so tightly wound, a firestorm of antagonism was ignited when Jonathan Jones, The Guardian’s art critic, wrote:

“In some banal way, it’s easy to say that food is art; that clothes are art. What’s more interesting is to ask whether they can be serious art: can they move us; change the way we see the world; make us think about profound matters?”

Jones’ conclusion was that cuisine and couture are carnal, not sharing that abstracted mental sphere that great art occupies.

One commenter declared that food is more like literature than art, since it:

“has a narrative, sometimes embodied in a menu, but often described in the interplay of the various elements on a plate … The way salt and sweet, cold and hot, texture and form play on a plate could be analogous to light and shade in painting, tone and register in writing, or in the right hands, even the same as those things. After all, food has a register too, and food is every bit as visual as art.”

D’oh!

Even so, it still came down to aesthetics, an imperative that has been removed from art since Dadaism. If art doesn’t look good, it can still serve its purpose well enough. If food doesn’t taste good, people won’t swallow it, won’t go back to the restaurant, won’t shell out the big bucks, won’t buy the books. It’s a split hair of a definition, but one which still defines.

And so what! Why does cuisine have to be art? Why can’t it it be appreciated and valued on its own terms? Where is this false hierarchy of importance coming from? And why is this even an issue?

♫ In short, there’s simply not a more congenial spot
♪ For happily-ever-aftering than here … ♪♫

So, what about a documentary film about food? Does that qualify as art?

Oddly enough, it does. Wetzel’s film uses a straightforward chronological and linear style of exposition and edits in key places to put many interesting thought-provoking points across without stating them outright. Through his lens we see how a highly dedicated staff interacts, even when stretched to the limits of their patience, without caving over personality issues; how the scientific process of experimentation and observation can produce chemical results which are appear magical to the uninitiated; how an abundance of originality, creativity and dedication can create a new style of cookery and inspire chefs around the world; and even how this can be stretched out into lengths suffice to recall the Roman Empire or the Sun King’s Reign in all their ridiculous excess.

It’s a meta, meta, meta, meta, meta world!

Badump-bump!♪♫

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