Barbecue (2014)

"Barbecue" arrives from France in 2014 with the confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is and has no intention of being anything else. Antoine Chevalier, played by Lambert Wilson, has spent fifty years watching his weight, his health, and his temper, and then his heart stops cooperating anyway. He resolves to let loose. That is the premise, and the film pursues it through a weekend of bourgeois friends, grilled meat, and the quiet disappointments of middle age. The Guardian found it boringly white-bread. The New York Times found it utterly unremarkable. Both assessments are correct, and neither is an insult the film bothers to deflect.

What interests us here is the absence. The ensemble is French, white, and comfortable, and nobody in the frame seems troubled by this arrangement. There is a health scare, and there is weight-watching, but these function as plot mechanics, the engine of a midlife crisis, not as an argument about bodies or wellness or anything else. Female characters bicker and reconcile, and the film lets them, without ever reaching for a thesis about gender. Money sits around the table the way it sits around any affluent dinner party, as furniture. No character lectures. Nobody is redeemed by a lesson. The camera simply watches adults behave badly and then go home.

We classify "Barbecue" as a clean slate, a specimen so free of contemporary cultural instruction that it reads almost as an artifact from another era, which, at eleven years old, it more or less is. It is not a good film. It is not a bad one either. It is a French comedy about a man who nearly dies and decides to eat more, and it asks nothing of us beyond a shrug and a laugh.