The Chef was a hilarious, feel good movie and to some extent for a thinker like me even though-provoking. The movie is inordinately stylish and it has imbibed and displayed American culture, as food is an important ingredient in the metaphorical food of culture, quite in its totality. The movie starts with a chef who is reasonably happy with his job, but then comes an all awaited night when a food critic is visiting the concerned restaurant. The chef has a heated altercation with his complacent, philistine supremo who wants the same menu to be prepared that has been dormantly existing since the last 10 years, however the chef has created a special menu to stun the food critic. There is a clear ideological difference arising out of this little anecdote between the adventurous chef and the opportunistic boss who seems to consider cooking as a mere employment or one of the important functions in a restaurant that needs to be performed. The main protagonist considers cooking not as a mere job that needs to be performed to make his ends meet. But he considers cooking as a singular, dignified and unparalleled art. He doesn't wants to cook food to have happy customers but he wants customers to concoct good food by mixing his multifarious, myriad ingredients. Somewhat I recollected what Steve Jobs said "The customers don't know what they want until we have shown them". However, the chef's obstinacy subsides and he succumbs to the pragmatic demands of his supremo. However the food critic appears to have learnt and graduated from the same school of thought and he detests the seemingly delectable food devoid of any innovativeness or inventiveness and consequently he lambasts the chef and his shadowy complacency on his blog which becomes viral on social media thus leading to ire from a chef who is completely oblivious to the complex web of the social world. This is the starting point of a magnificent ride.
The movie shows you how social media plays a magnanimous, prodigious role to reach the incipient customers. The Chef here is completely alien to the world of social media and is catapulted like a rocket in an estranged planet which becomes a source of constant chagrin and mortification for the bereaved chef who finally loses his job for standing to his beliefs. The story is one of a person reaching the stage of self-realisation, finally realising what he wants to do and experiencing unconditional bliss arising from the work itself and not from some related or peripheral benefits arising out of it. It's a story of a person finally reconnecting to his innocent son whose father, the main protagonist,is somewhat reckless in performing his parental duties that is partly attributed to his divorced marriage ,the oppressing pressures of his work and his own insatiable desire to achieve a perennial creative ingenuity in his work. It's story of a person who finally tightens the bolts and the nuts that is needed in the effective functioning of the machine of his family. One of the most ironical part of the movie is that he finally become self employed with the help of the ex-husband of his ex-wife. That also depicts the complexity of relationships in the developed world and the adroitness with which they deal with their complicated worlds. There is a lot of flamboyance, style and the American culture that coerces you to stand up and applaud. That is one of the most sparkling, scintillating features of American movie that they have succeeded to insinuate a sense of American culture in their films. Something our Bollywood needs to learn who are apathetic to their own cultures and have become obsequious to the Western culture.
The acting of all the actors is such that they are not playing any part, they have not taken any effort to play their roles. This is the biggest compliment I can give to an actor. An actor is performing superlatively when you actually feel that he is not acting, but just playing himself.
Anyways the movie is a must watch. If I go on I will add a lot of spoilers, so please go and watch.
4 stars from me.
