Taste of life
We remember the way movie characters eat and the food they prefer as well as their main catch phrases.
For example, Ryan Murphy’s Eat Pray Love starring Julia Roberts, who was paid US $10 mn for that role. At the age of 40 her character tries overcoming depression. First, she divorces her husband, but even that doesn’t help. Then she falls in love with a younger artist and matters only get worse. Then she takes off on a round-the-world trip to find herself. First she goes to Italy and she little by little begins savoring the taste of life: spaghetti in a street cafe in Rome to the accompaniment of opera arias, a trip to Naples to taste their world famous pizza – all that proves to be good. When she places an order in a cafe for her friends, it reminds of the sounds of music: a large plate of Jewish artichokes, prosciutto with melon, eggplants with ricotta cheese, spaghetti a la carbonara, pappardelle with rabbit ragout, linguini with clams, trippa alla Romana (Roman-style tripe), chops and 2 liters of Cinzano. The finishing touch is a plate of delicacies, which she made for herself: asparagus in olive oil, cheese, olives, grapes, crusty baguette, a boiled egg and ham. Despite the simplicity of such dishes, they are prepared in such combinations that create a pure symphony of taste. In one word – farewell to melancholy!
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| Two Days PHÎÒÎ: scene from the movie |
Universal scrambled eggs
Unfortunately, in contemporary movies there are very few delicious national dishes that exude an aroma from the screen that tantalizes the viewing audience’s sense of smell. Even there where eating habits are leveled globalization rules. The most demonstrative example is morning around different parts of the world in the film Life in a Day produced by Ridley Scott and on YouTube. Internet users were asked to videotape everything that happened to them in a day. Academy Award winning British director Kevin McDonald made an hour-and-a-half film with 4,500 hours of videos sent from 140 countries. It turned out most people’s mornings begin with making fried eggs, coffee and toast. Some gourmets add pancakes to such a conventional trio. And only true sons of mother nature in the remote African or Carpathian villages start their day with a glass of fresh goat milk.
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| Eat Pray Love PHÎÒÎ: scene from the movie |
Fast life – fast food
While there are only a few films in which people feast, there are many in which the characters wolf down fast food on the run. Well, that is understandable. After all, people that live life in the fast lane tend to get easily addicted to eating fast food. People have no time for sensual delights. Career and money are their main priorities.
Sarah Jessica Parker’s main character in I Don’t Know How She Does It is busy as a bee and is torn apart between home and work. Every minute she proves her super professionalism in a major investment company and simply cannot find the time to demonstrate her skills in the kitchen. Playing three roles in one – a mother, a wife and a financial executive – she has to keep up with everything. Then she swears to bake a pie for her daughter’s school fair and once again fast food comes to the rescue. Her character runs to a supermarket, buys a pie and decides to add to it some homemade accoutrements. But of course nothing good can come out of this, as home-baked pies are not only about culinary skills, but about a chef’s love for the people they bake them for.
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| Life in a Day |
Rooney Mara’s character in David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Lisbeth Salander prefers food in boxes and paper bags. Sitting down and eating like most normal people is not for her. She likes her food thickly drowned in ketchup.
David Mackenzie created scary pictures of the future without sensory perceptions in his film Perfect Sense released last year. An epidemic begins to deprive people of all the five human senses. At first people lose their sense of smell, then taste and they can no longer tell whether fish smells like the sea and they eat spoonfuls of mustard. That is a gourmet’s nightmare! Is it really possible that in the future people will have for breakfast a nutrient formula in blue tubes, lunch in red tubes and dinner in green tubes like in some sci-fi books or films? And will there no be escargot de Bourgogne (Burgundy snails) or even the standard macaroni with meat balls?
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| Platon Angel PHÎÒÎ: scene from the movie |
Live deliciously!
Fortunately, such horrific images of global senselessness are in the distant future. So, for now everyone can experience the joys of gourmet eating like in Nora Ephron’s main culinary movie hit of recent years Julie and Julia.
Julia Child (Meryl Streep) is an outstanding chef who published a book containing French cuisine recipes and taught American women how to cook. Julie Powell (Amy Adams) is a blogger trying to the master culinary art with the help of Julia’s book and writing about her experiences on her web-page.
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| Sibir, Monamur PHÎÒÎ: scene from the movie |
The 524 dishes that Julia cooked in 365 days are not simply nicely served calories. They are the taste of life, an opportunity to escape the daily routine and find a spiritual balance and show the desire and ability to enjoy life.
She says: “Spirit, joy and the proper mood – those are the things that matter in the kitchen”. And her worthy understudy adds: “I love that after a day when nothing is certain, you can come home and add egg yolks, sugar and milk to chocolate it will most definitely get thick.” Very comforting.
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