For all the drugs and punch-ups, this is an unexpectedly sentimental coming-of-age story – or maybe origin myth – about the formative youthful kitchen experiences of legendary badass chef Anthony Bourdain. It is taken from the opening chapters in his bestselling memoir Kitchen Confidential; Canadian film-maker Matt Johnson directs and Dominic Sessa (the callow kid from Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers) plays the conceited, smug yet lonely and vulnerable young college student Tony. “Anthony” is in the future.
It is the mid-1970s and Tony effectively runs away from home after failing to get a residential summer writing scholarship that he had assured everyone was in the bag. He shows up nearly penniless in the seaside vacation resort of Provincetown, Massachusetts – a place that is pretty similar to Amity Island in Jaws, which is showing at every drive-in. The reason is that he has a desperate crush on Nancy (Emilia Jones) who is there for the summer too and whom he desperately wants to impress with his smouldering intellectualism.
Then, having got drunkenly thrown out of a bar serving seafood, pathetic Tony gets hired there as a humble dishwasher by its kindly-stern chef (Antonio Banderas). He finds he kinda likes the heat in the kitchen, and gets to know louche, coke-addled womanising chef Sal (Leo Woodall) who shows Tony the ropes of being a tough guy and a player, but who is, in the time-honoured manner of films like this, Tony’s sacrificial mentor: inspirational figure and awful warning.
This is a strange film in some ways. It is watchable and entertaining, but its feelgood trajectory is compromised by what we know of the author. In 2000, when the book came out and Bourdain was approaching the height of his celebrity, these anecdotes would have felt simply warm, wry and funny. If he was still alive now, Bourdain would assuredly have an ironic cameo, perhaps as one of the greybeard authority figures that obstruct the rake’s progress. But we are watching the film in the knowledge that Bourdain took his own life in 2018 after a painful breakup, having suffered from instability and depression. All the sadness, all the emotional danger that this film gestures at, all the crises that the drama suggests are just obstacles to be surmounted … they are all very real.
How exactly, for example, do we take the moment in this movie when Banderas’s character tells Tony about François Vatel, chef to Louis XIV, who killed himself in shame when the key ingredients didn’t arrive for a banquet? (It’s not in the book, though Bourdain spoke about it in interviews as an example of extreme perfectionism.) The scene is presumably there tacitly to acknowledge Bourdain’s heartbreaking fate. It sits oddly.
As for Sessa himself, Johnson gives him plenty of shots looking silently stricken, or hungover, often sporting a black eye. In a way, Tony is the author, the narrator who just bleakly sees it all, but for a writer he sometimes doesn’t have much to say about the situation in which he finds himself. There’s some nice support from Rich Sommer and Dagmara Dominczyk as Pierre and Gladys, Tony’s parents, and Banderas always has gentleness and charm. A bittersweet dish.
