Haute Cuisine

The standard cuisine film you would expect from the french commercial cinema -- light-hearted tone, but plenty of crowd-pleasing and tear-jerking moments surrounding the climax. The parallelism between the cooker who works for the president in the past and the cooker who works for some working-class dudes in an island also lacks enough subtlety. Catherine saves the day -- not just cooking visually stunning and apparently delicious food.

A rather light-hearted film that was fairly entertaining, despite its meager plot. Frot was a joy to watch and carried the film with finesse. Her scenes with the President (played by the charming d'Ormesson) were especially compelling, though too few and far between. It felt surprisingly claustrophobic for its larger-than-life subject matter. Certainly not bad, but nothing remarkable either.