Tony’s Review – Knives for a delicious re-release of Anthony Bourdain’s memoir | Video

For all medicine and boxing, this is an unexpected coming-of-age story – or rather an original tale – about the youthful adventures in the kitchen of a famous chef. Anthony Bourdain. Taken from the opening chapters of her best-selling memoir Kitchen Confidential; Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson directs and Dominic Sessa (the callow kid from Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers) plays the cocky, cocky but lonely and troubled college student Tony. “Anthony” is in the future.

It’s the mid-1970s and Tony ran away from home after failing to get a summer writing internship that ensured everyone was in the bag. He shows up almost penniless in a beach resort in Provincetown, Massachusetts – a place very similar to Amity Island in Jaws, which is shown in every car. The reason is that he has a crush on Nancy (Emilia Jones) who is also in the summer and who is eager to have fun with his smoking hot brain.

Then, after getting drunk at a seafood bar, a depressed Tony is hired there as a dishwasher by his kind chef (Antonio Banderas). He discovers that he likes to warm up in the kitchen, and gets to know the louche, coke-addled womanizing chef Sal (Leo Woodall) who shows Tony the ropes of being a tough guy and a football player, but who is, in respectable films like this one, Tony’s sacrifice: an inspiring image and a terrifying warning.

This is a strange film in some ways. It’s visual and interesting, but its clear approach is hampered by what we know about the author. In 2000, when the book came out and Bourdain was approaching the height of his fame, these stories would have sounded hot, dirty and funny. If he were still alive, Bourdain would have a sense of humor, perhaps as one of the chiefs holding the group back from moving forward. But we are watching the film knowing that Bourdain took his own life in 2018 after a painful divorce, suffering from instability and depression. All the sadness, the emotional danger that the film portrays, all the challenges that the drama portrays and the obstacles that need to be overcome… it’s all real.

How exactly, for example, we take a moment in this movie where Banderas’ character tells Tony about François Vatel, chef to Louis XIVwho killed himself in shame when the necessary ingredients did not arrive at the party? (This is not in the book, although Bourdain talked about it in an interview as an example of a serious mistake.) The episode seems to exist in an eager acknowledgment of Bourdain’s painful future. It’s amazing.

As for Sessa herself, Johnson does a lot of shooting of her looking quiet, or slumped over, often sporting a black eye. In a sense, Tony is the writer, the storyteller who sees everything, but for a writer sometimes he doesn’t have much to say about what he knows. There is good support from Rich Sommer and Dagmara Dominczyk as Pierre and Gladys, Tony’s parents, and Banderas is always calm and charming. A bitter dish.