Regarding the palate, The menu Y The BearThey have a lot to say. In fact, both productions share important aspects that revolve around food as a meeting point.
In the movie The menuby Mark Mylod Available on Disney+ and Star+, Eating is a way of exercising a kind of despotic power. The script turns eating into an allegory of decadence and arrogance. Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) uses the pleasure of tasting as a status symbol. The plot reflects on hunger as a twisted version of vanity through a group of characters with sophisticated palates whose intention is to show off the place where they are. Also the privilege of being part of a total experience that includes designer culinary dishes. An impersonal perspective on an intimate act.
On the contrary, the series The Bearfrom Disney+, reinterprets the art of cooking as consolation. Most of his scenes take place in a gastronomic space, but they have little to do with food. Amid the frenetic activity of the restaurant, the plot asks questions about grief and suicide. Even on topics as abstract as the urge to please. The production bases its effectiveness on making it credible that preparing food is a way of expressing intellectual ideas.
The Bearlove in the form of a sandwich
However, it does not create a complicated scenario. Unlike in The menu, the diners are passers-by from the street and the team indoors, friends for many years. The scenario of the argument allows us to reflect on the nature of love, loneliness and mourning in a realistic and sensitive way. In the dilapidated kitchen of the old Italian restaurant, the very act of eating becomes a symbol of humanity.
As curious as it may seem, the views of The Bear Y The menu come together in a single scenario. Food as a way of understanding the human being and its context. Also to make symbolic comments about urgent pressures, dark intellectual spaces and even hope.
All while a group of cooks — in the case of The Bear — or guests at an opulent dinner — in The menu— are linked through the palate. How accurate is that look at a primitive impulse that encompasses the identity of those who eat?
It is not an easy concept. So much The menu What The Bear they are obsessed with the urge for pleasure. But while the Boston street restaurant in the Disney+ series analyzes the approach from a utilitarian and frank air, the film slides through dark spaces. The film establishes, almost immediately, that the Hawthorn restaurant is an insular, isolated and unreachable place. That what will be served on the tables is unique and that it should be consumed with that reverence.
In the meantime, The Bearconsider the possibility of eating as a bond that can unite the characters from simplicity. For Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), a top chef trying to save the family restaurant, cooking is a challenge. At the same time, the only way for him to honor his deceased brother, whose suicide made him go back to his origins. The treatment of the series about food as a transit towards sensitive perspectives of the human being is exciting. Eating is a drive, an organic fact capable of consoling.
In The menu, the idea is pondered through cynical derision. Feeding is not a kind act, but an aggressive one. Chef Slowik is in charge of a group of cooks who blindly obey him. Even willing to kill or be killed to do their bidding. The restaurant’s kitchen is a sounding board of defects, quarrels and pettiness. A translation through food of the miserable acts and shady secrets of those who will eat.
The interesting thing is that both productions, The menu Y The Bear, address the primary appetites of the human being. For the Disney+ production, food is a level of communication. In Mylod’s film, an attack, a form of signaling and a punishment.
When we combine the perspectives of The menu Y The Bear , one thing is clear: eating exacerbates irrational instincts. Much more, it shows the extent to which the urge for a basic act exposes twisted elements of society.
The menuhe mocks the gastronomic culture that turns food into a staging. He achieves this by turning the diner into an individual whose relationship with food is far from natural. The elegant argument turns suspense into evil satire about posture snob in the act of eating. The twelve guests at this deadly dinner are part of a high concept, which has little or nothing to do with pleasure.
The Bear , with its claustrophobic atmosphere, colorful shots and use of the subjective camera to narrate what happens in a small restaurant, is an homage. Both cooking — which Carmy turns into an atonement for family mourning — and the way of doing it are an expression of love.
The intriguing thing is that The menuY The Bear they link the same idea, but the first does so in its most perfidious and poisonous strata. The invitation is “to taste”, not to eat. To surrender the will, not to enjoy the simple act of primary satisfaction.
Both one proposal and the other make it clear that eating can become an understanding of the human being as a whole. At its hardest and most emotional points. A narrative experiment in which The menuY The BearThey take a simple fact such as eating to new dimensions.