Le Chef (2012)

Le Chef arrives from 2012, a French comedy in which Jean Reno plays Alexandre Lagarde, a grand chef whose corporate overlords wish to strip his restaurant of a star and replace his kitchen with molecular foam. Michaël Youn plays Jacky Bonnot, a self-taught prodigy with a pregnant girlfriend and a temperament that renders him unemployable. The film is pleasant. It is also, by the standards of our current cultural accounting, remarkably innocent.

The kitchen brigade at Cargo Lagarde includes cooks of West African and East Asian descent, played by Issa Doumbia, Bun Hay Mean, and Kentaro. They chop, they banter, they exist. Nobody in the screenplay pauses to reflect on what their presence signifies, which is either a quiet virtue or a failure of ambition, depending on the ledger we keep. The women fare less well. Beatrice is pregnant and then disappointed. Amandine is a postgraduate daughter nursing resentment toward an indifferent father. Neither is granted a grievance beyond the domestic. Stanislas Matter, the tetchy heir, wants to cut jobs in favor of a trendy concept, which lends the proceedings a faint whiff of the artisan against the boardroom. The film treats this as a dispute about craft and pride. It never reaches for the systemic.

What the film does offer is a light touch. It shows instead of lecturing, and its morals arrive through the pleasure of a well-made dish. There is no climate anxiety, no body-image sermon, no neurodivergent diagnosis for Jacky's finickiness, no revision of history, and no romantic subplot that wanders outside the conventional. We are left with a gentle relic, a cooking comedy that wants only to feed us.