Haute Cuisine: Truffles & Politics

New York is currently in the midst of the Tribeca Film Festival and theaters are brimming with high-quality cinematic entertainment. One spotlight film is Haute Cuisine, a delicious French film that will leave you both hungry and satisfied.

Haute Cuisine is a quasi-biopic about a woman who became French President Francois Mitterand's personal chef for two years. Catherine Frot plays Hortense Laborie, a woman who runs a small farm in the French countryside and established a culinary school for international chefs. However, one day she gets a call from some government officials and is whisked off to Elysee Palace, where the Chief of Staff tells her she has been selected to be the President's personal chef. She is bewildered but can't refuse the position; by the end of the week she has moved to Paris. Her first foray into the Palace kitchens reveal that it is a boys' club - there are no female chefs in sight and the Main Kitchen is predisposed to look down on anyone who works in the Private Kitchen. Faced with opposition from the very beginning, Hortense nonetheless sets out to change the way things are done and ensure that the President is served the best that French cuisine has to offer.

Hortense's love for food is evident in every frame. She is the only one in the hierarchy of public servants who dares to ask what kind of food the President actually likes to eat, as opposed to just blindly following the protocols and schedules that dictate the daily proceedings. Initially, her only source of information is the maitre d', who gives her copious notes on how the President ate his food and how clean his plate was at the end of every meal. After a few weeks of this roundabout intel-gathering, Hortense finally secures a meeting with the man himself, and they share a delightful conversation about recipe books, French home cooking, and the joys of truffles.

The movie goes back back and forth between Hortense's time in Paris and her current job as a chef at a scientific base at Antarctica. It's an odd juxtaposition and we are told from the very beginning that things didn't go well at Elysee Palace. The story unfolds slowly and amidst the comedy and deliciousness, there are also roadblocks and conflicts set up by the male chefs who resent Hortense's influence over the President's palate. As the government starts to interfere with her menus, Hortense finds herself longing for her old uncomplicated life.

Haute Cuisine is the story of real-life chef Daniele Delpeuch, and while some elements of the story are imagined, the basic facts are still extraordinary and true. She was a formidable woman with a formidable job, and director Christian Vincent tells her story with relish. If you're in New York, you can queue up for rush tickets to watch this movie this week (details are here on the Tribeca website). So treat yourself to a delicious French film and never look at a truffle in the same way again.

Central Park Five: Justice Is Long Overdue

The activist documentary is a genre that has gained prominence over recent years, perhaps most notably with the Paradise Lost trilogy. Now famed documentarian Ken Burns has come out with The Central Park Five, a movie about a horrifying 1989 rape case that resulted in the conviction and imprisonment of five minority teenagers who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Burns first establishes the setting - New York City in 1989 was a mess. The city was plagued by crime, with crack dealers all over the city, seething racial tensions, and murder and muggings were commonplace. Things were at a boiling point when a white female jogger was found in the northern part of Central Park, barely alive and the victim of a horrific physical and sexual attack. The Central Park Five were five minority teens ranging in age from 14 to 16, who had been in the park that night and had unwittingly found themselves among a group of teens who were causing trouble by throwing stones at cars and hassling people in the park. The five were arrested along with the other teens for rioting and "wilding" as they called it, but once the Central Park jogger was discovered, the police quickly decided that these teens must have also been responsible for attacking and raping her.

The documentary tells this story via first-person interviews with the five men and various reporters who covered the case. The Five were subjected to intense police interrogations and coerced into making false confessions. Their parents were misinformed, confused, and at no point thought about getting lawyers so their sons would stop incriminating themselves. The detectives fed the teens with information, and they just spouted back what they were told, making up conflicting details that didn't even tally with the crime scene. In the movie, one of the Five watches his videotaped confession and can't believe what he was saying. As they read their signed statements, each man is startled, one of them saying, "what kind of 14-year old would talk like this?" After they were arrested, every single one of them recanted, denying that they had been responsible for this heinous crime. But it was too late, and their false confessions were used against them. They were sentenced to five to ten years in prison, with Khorey Wise receiving a longer sentence because he was 16 and tried as an adult.

Throughout their prison sentence, the Five proclaimed their innocence, which meant that they were consistently denied parole. After seven years, four of them were finally released and attempted to resume their lives, which was no easy feat. But in 2002, Khorey Wise, who was still in prison, ran into Matias Reyes, a man who was serving life imprisonment for a series of murders and rapes across the Upper East Side in the late 80s. Reyes started telling fellow inmates that he felt bad that Wise had been imprisoned for a crime he hadn't committed. Detectives were called in and before long, they had a full confession from Reyes as the man solely responsible for the Central Park rape. The Five were completely exonerated and their convictions were vacated, eleven long years after their wrongful arrest and imprisonment.

The Central Park Five is an eyeopening look at the miscarriage of justice and the NYPD still refuses to accept any blame for mishandling this case. They even had DNA evidence that could have identified Reyes as the rapist, but they were so fixated on the idea that these five teenagers were responsible that they were blind to any other theories or evidence. Three members of the Central Park Five filed a civil lawsuit against the City of New York in 2003, which has yet to be resolved because the City adamantly denies any wrongdoing. The documentary discusses the disheartening fact that despite the media storm over the case in 1989, the innocence of the Five received remarkably little media interest and was quickly forgotten. The Central Park Five aims to address that incongruity and give these five men the chance to have their stories heard. Hopefully it will result in a swell of public support and ensure that these men finally receive some justice. Nothing can give them back the childhood they lost in the prison system, but at least New York can give them some remuneration and most importantly, a long overdue apology.

Mr. Selfridge: The Department Store is Born

PBS's latest foray into British television is Mr. Selfridge. The show begins in 1909 London, as American Harry Gordon Selfridge (played by a delightful Jeremy Piven), embarks on a quest to establish his department store on Oxford Street. In 2013, Selfridges is a world-renowned department store, but in 1909, it was a highly unusual enterprise, run by a highly unusual man.

Harry Gordon Selfridge is loud, friendly, and bursting with ideas about transforming the basic shopping experience. His confident American ways are in constant conflict with the cautious pessimism of his British colleagues, but he happily steamrolls their protests and goes ahead with his risky business plan. Selfridge's main aim is to make shopping fun, not a chore, and he comes up with such innovations as leaving the merchandise out on counters so customers can freely browse the products without being committed to buy them. He also has a boundless curiosity and organizes many in-store exhibits about new and exciting events and inventions that are changing the world.

This period of English history also includes changing roles for women, with suffragettes campaigning on the streets to get the vote and women becoming increasingly independent. Selfridge recognizes the changing tide and fully embraces the women's movement. To all outward appearances, he was a cheerful and committed family man, but modern television doesn't allow us to have flawless protagonists. Instead, Mr. Selfridge gives us an in-depth look at Selfridge's family life, and the numerous affairs and vices that Harry dabbled in. His wife Rose (the charming Frances O'Connor), puts up with these dalliances, but her patience can't endure for much longer. Meanwhile, his youngest daughter, Violette, is turning into a mini-suffragette, while his eldest daughter, Rosalie, is preparing to make her debut in society, despite being hampered with a "shopkeeper" for a father.

The store itself is populated by a fascinating mix of characters, including the talented window-dresser Henri Leclair (Gregory Fitoussi) who is responsible for the famous Selfridges windows that are an integral part of the store's identity, and Agnes Towler (Aisling Loftus) who is a senior assistant in Accesories but has plenty of ambition and ability to move up the ranks. Like all great period dramas, there are plenty of intrigues and jealousies among the staff, multiple love affairs, aristocratic maneuverings, and sordid matters of commerce. The home lives of the staff members constantly bleed into their professional lives, and Harry's compassion and understanding when dealing with his loyal staff is always engaging.

Mr. Selfridge is an excellent series about an intriguing character in the midst of an interesting period of English history. PBS has aired three hours of the drama already (all of which can be viewed online here), so get caught up and tune in on Sunday nights (after the wonderful Call the Midwife!) to catch the latest installment. The next time you walk into a department store, you'll notice Harry Gordon Selfridge's ideas and innovations all around you.