In the Flesh: The Menu

“We strive for perfection, which of course does not exist, and this is a difficult truth for me to accept. So please, bear with me.” Thus speaks chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) of the exclusive offshore restaurant Hawthorn, the kind of place you might see showcased in one of Chef’s Table’s breathless paens to snobbish one-percenter crimes against edibility. Over a grand per plate, slavish devotion to the kitchen by chef and staff alike, and for what? So a crowd of moronic rich people can slurp it down in between snapping pictures for their foodie instagrams and bickering over their dysfunctional relationships? So a critic high on her own reputation can congratulate herself over her ridiculous faux-insights into its culinary achievements? In fixating on perfection, Slowik has only succeeded in participating in the slow sucking of life out of the art form he loves and to which he has dedicated his existence.

Director Mark Mylod shoots The Menu with a studied quality just short of fussiness. He’s making us a cheeseburger, not one of Slowik’s tweezer-built “culinary ecosystems”, but that cheeseburger is a work of art, assembled with love and to serve a purpose. It’s the part of his love for food that has escaped him in his quest for greatness. For perfection. The script is perhaps a little heavy-handed in letting us in on the game, and perhaps it sacrifices a little of its edge in constructing the escape of wrong-place-wrong-time sex worker Margot/Erin (Anya Taylor Joy) from Slowik’s self-annihilating Rube Goldberg machine of a dinner service, but in such an otherwise tightly constructed and thoughtfully written film, a little human error adds a certain flavor. Nicholas Hoult's repugnant performance as a moneyed, insecure wannabe chef and the blistering viciousness of Fienne's "taco Tuesday" monologue -- a skewer to the heart of making impersonal art out of deeply personal things -- more than make up for any little bumps in the road.

Food may be the medium in which Mylod unfolds his story, but its applicability to all of art is clear. Art made solely for — and, crucially, by — the powerful is a sterile, predatory thing. It’s essential to the film’s success that Slowik castigates not only his customers but himself, opening with their humiliation before revealing his own basest qualities and the ways in which he’s abused his status and the respect his team affords him. He’s expressing his contempt not just with the grotesquery around his art, but with the grotesquery he has helped that art become. Perhaps the film’s final explosion of violence could go a bit harder, perhaps Joy’s character could use another little snippet of backstory, but The Menu knows its business and sets about achieving it with consummate professionalism. Art isn’t foam reductions, or deconstructed s’more’s, or flash-frozen seawater: art is bread. We need it to live. When we pervert it, we starve.