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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Review: Step Up to the Plate (Entre les Bras)

You don’t have to be a foodie to appreciate Step Up to the Plate (Entre les Bras), Paul Lacoste’s terrific documentary chronicling the decision of celebrated chef Michel Bras to hand over the reins of his renowned restaurant, located in Laguiole in the heart of southern France’s agricultural region, to his son Sebastien (Seba to his father). If you are a foodie, though, and you’ve ever dreamed of attaining the holy grail of actually dining at Bras, you’ll revel in the opportunity to see these master chefs at work, creating edible, exquisite art plated with every bit the care and precision a master painter considers brushstroke, color and composition. But this documentary tells a story about more than the art of haute cuisine.

Filmed over the course of a year and structured in four chapters that express the seasonal use of local products, Step Up to the Plate is as much about the relationship between a father and a son, and, in particular, the emotional and intellectual challenge of being the offspring of a person much renowned in their field of endeavor, who seeks to follow in that parent’s footsteps, as it is about the food this famous father and son create. You might say Sebastien Bras chose being a chef, but then again you might say being a chef chose him.

From the time he was dressed in miniature chef’s whites, learning to use a knife and to select produce and herbs at his father’s knee, this was his path and his destiny. But his mother, who has always been the hostess of her husband’s restaurants, expresses her concern that her son be able to find himself, to make his own place in the food world, and fears that the pressure of potential failure is too great. After all, she notes, Michel had it easier, he started at the bottom and worked his way up to the top; his son has the unenviable position of being already at the top, and having to stay there while stepping out of his father’s shadow and truly into his own place in the world.

The film is sumptuously — one might even say rapturously — shot, capturing the stunning beauty of the region, the carefully minimalist architecture of the restaurant, perched high above the fields, and most of all, the careful, meticulous work that these chefs put into their creations. The opening sequence, in which Michel Bras plates his famous gargouillou, a deconstructed salad composed of over 60 ingredients — fresh spring vegetables, herbs, bulbs, flower petals, fruits, seed pods and more, is mesmerizing. This mirrors nicely with the ongoing, integrated chronicle of Sebastien’s painstaking, agonizing work over the course of the year to create on his own a new dish that will serve, if he can only get it right, as a symbolic passing of the mantle from father to son. Meanwhile, fellow chefs and locals speculate at a grape festival that Sebastien will never be able to fully come into his own until his father steps down.

Lacoste merges beautiful, quietly meditative scenes of Sebastien gazing upon the countryside in which he grew up, while pondering the future that lies before him; tense moments of Sebastien struggling to find the right combination of ingredients for his new signature dish (appropriately enough, translated when he presents it at the end of the film as “The Pathway”); and both father and son critiquing each others creations, even as they clearly share a love of the French countryside, their restaurant, their cuisine, and each other. And fittingly, Lacoste brings his theme of fathers and sons to its own natural pathway, with Sebastien teaching his own young son — now wearing the miniature chef’s whites given him by his father — to follow in his own footsteps some day.

Step Up to the Plate (Entre le Bras) opens today in New York, with a national release to follow. Highly recommended.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon