Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: The profound lesson Tony teaches us about Anthony Bourdain

In a busy week for movies, Matt Johnson’s loose adaptation of the early chapters of Anthony Bourdain’s global bestseller Kitchen Confidential (2000) is the pick of the bunch. 

Indeed, so good in the lead role is Dominic Sessa – you remember him from Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers (2023) – that the movie would be a gem even if it didn’t amount to the superhero origin story of a much-mourned celebrity chef.

Turned down for a writing fellowship he thought he had in the bag, 19-year-old Vassar student Bourdain, still defiantly calling himself Tony, heads in the summer of 1985 for Provincetown, Massachusetts, in pursuit of Nancy (Emilia Jones). He fancies himself a man of letters, deploys words such as “bildungsroman” without quite understanding them, and claims to be writing a counterpart to Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London but in the style of Kerouac. 

His swagger is writing cheques his talent cannot yet cash (“It’s like God is finally starting to notice me”), and his gaucheness is agonising to behold. Drunk and unruly one night at the Flagship, a seafood joint run by the nameless Chef (Antonio Banderas), he is knocked senseless by prep cook Sal (Leo Woodall).  When Chef later discovers Tony lying senseless on the pavement, he lets him sleep it off on his porch hammock.

So begins an enchanted season in which the young Bourdain slowly constructs the basis of an authentic self as a dishwasher in the rough-and-tumble of the Flagship’s kitchen. As anyone who saw last month’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie can attest, Johnson is a cinematic laureate of male friendship, and he surrounds his clueless Seeker with a rowdy fellowship of mythic archetypes of masculinity (naturally, Tony loves to quote Carl Jung to girls).

There’s the Joker, Stavros (stand-up comedian Stavros Halkias), who ribs Tony about the meaning of his nickname “Flaco”; the Wise Warrior, Tyrone (Michael Jibrin), whose hands are so calloused from years at the stove that he can pick up a scalding skillet; the Sin-Eater, as Chef describes Sal, a charismatic rogue who takes Tony under his wing, gives him drugs and boosts cars for joyrides; and the Mentor, played by Banderas with just the right balance of discipline (he wakes Tony every morning with a pan of cold sea water) and warmth.

In the process, the lost young man gradually realises that his creativity would be better invested in the alchemy of cooking than in pretentious prose (though Bourdain did go on to become a superb writer). Even as he woos Nancy, he is also falling in love with the preparation of ingredients, with the catch of the day, with Chef’s vintage cookery books.

Tony has been criticised for confining itself to this early episode in a life of huge success that ended in tragedy (Bourdain died by suicide in 2018). But this misses the whole point and emotional weight of the movie. 

As a feat of compression, it is a parable of initiation, apprenticeship and rites of passage. And yes: when Chef recounts to Tony the tale of François Vatel – the legendary maître d’hôtel who ran himself through with a sword in 1671 because a seafood delivery he needed for the feast he was preparing for Louis XIV was late – we feel a terrible shiver of premonition.

Yet the moment passes. Tony is anything but a didactic film, but if it has a lesson, it is that the story of a remarkable life should not be defined by its ending alone.

Suggested Reading

The dishes that made Anthony Bourdain

Josh Barrie

FILM

Lady (selected cinemas)

“Come and see where the magic happens!”: thus does Lady Isabella (Sian Clifford) welcome a camera crew into Ravenhyde Hall in this terrific first feature from Sam Abrahams. “Everyone’s saying I’m the aristocracy’s answer to the Kardashians,” she continues – also revealing her plan to enter her own talent competition, “Stately Stars”.

Laurie Kynaston is excellent as Sam, a younger alter ego of the director, hoping to make his name with what he is assured is a project backed by Netflix.  Initially, he is an adroit foil to Clifford, whose performance is simply spectacular; giving her the space to mash up the awkwardness of David Brent in The Office with the snobbery of Downton Abbey and the spookiness of MR James. “Where do you stand on ice buckets?” she asks. “Bit naff? Bit Surrey?”

Gradually, however, Sam gets entangled in Isabella’s life, her eccentricity (“since when is milk not sexy?”) and her personal predicament. “I could adopt you,” she tells him. “It’s a formality.” 

They take mushroom drops together and get absurdly high. As Sam becomes part of the story, his crew mutinies and refuses to take direction – a nod towards the challenge that faces every documentary maker striving for objectivity against the gravitational pull of emotional absorption.

Greater intimacy brings with it incremental disclosure. Isabella’s husband is supposedly in Capri (“We have an arrangement”) and their son is at boarding school, “away from his parents, becoming a man.” But is he really?

Meanwhile, Isabella clocks that Sam is paralysed by nerves, and tries to help with lashings of champagne – “some sparkle-darkle might help with those jitters!” One moment she is quoting Lady Macbeth; the next she has a panic attack in the car when he suggests a visit to an art gallery in Norwich. 

Sequestered in her country pile, she is “alone, and slowly disappearing” – literally so, it transpires, as the film lurches into the realm of magic realism. As the lady vanishes, and not just figuratively, Sam realises that he may have a monster hit on his hands after all. 

As the story gets weirder, Korsshan Schlauer’s haunting cinematography draws the very best from the location, Somerleyton Hall in Suffolk, where the film was shot in only 15 days.

After the first act of toe-curling comedy and shaky-cam sight gags, most “mockumentaries” have a tendency to run out of steam. But, thanks to a first-class screenplay by Abrahams and his partner Miranda Campbell Bowling, and its tremendous cast, Lady quickly escapes the limitations of the genre to become something strange, poignant and memorable.

Suggested Reading

The Odyssey is a masterwork that reinvents the epic

Matthew d’Ancona

FILM

The End of Oak Street (general release)

It’s proving quite a summer for Anne Hathaway: having only just got rid of 108 suitors from the palace of Ithaca in The Odyssey, she is now catapulted even further back in time, from an American cul-de-sac in 1982, to the Cretaceous period where a herd of dinosaurs is waiting to menace her family and neighbours.

David Robert Mitchell’s popcorn August movie is an unashamed slice of mid-period Spielbergiana. It’s all there: Pat Benatar’s Hit Me with Your Best Shot, kids on BMX bikes, Polaroids, a mischievous dog called Starbuck, picket fences, and (of course) the imperilled American nuclear family. 

Hathaway is Denise Platt, secretly writing a semi-autobiographical novel about fleeing domesticity, while Ewan McGregor is her husband Greg, hiding the fact that he has been laid off, as well as the half bottle of Scotch in the garage from which he swigs even before the dinosaurs turn up. Their children Brian (Christian Convery) and Audrey (Maisy Stella) know that all is not well. It’s the kind of marital discord that only a wildly implausible journey back in time can really fix.

So how come the leafy midwestern enclave of Flowervale is plunged into the past? The explanation barely qualifies as such – though the brainy Audrey does mention some ideas she has picked up from Carl Sagan. 

Unlike The Last House, Louis Leterrier’s earnest sci-fi riff on Covid lockdown now streaming on Netflix, The End of Oak Street doesn’t take itself remotely seriously – and, as a consequence, is all the more enjoyable. 

BOOK NOW

Autumns seem that season of beginning…

In the spirit of Truman Capote, here are a few booking recommendations for the months ahead. If you have yet to explore the magnificence of Richard Wagner – or if, like TNW’s own Paul Mason and myself, you are a devotee already – then Evgeny Titov’s new production of Parsifal (Royal Opera House, London, October 1-17) is the ideal place to start.

There’s also plenty of theatre to look forward to: Marianne Elliott’s production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup (Soho Place, September 21-December 19); James Graham’s new play, The Standard of Living (Theatre Royal Haymarket, September 21-December 12), directed by Sir Nicholas Hytner, with Rory Kinnear as John Maynard Keynes; and The Lives of Others (Adelphi Theatre, October 14-January 9), Robert Icke’s adaptation of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s acclaimed 2007 movie, starring Keira Knightley, Stephen Dillane, and Luke Thompson.

The blockbuster exhibition of the year will undoubtedly be the British Museum’s display of the Bayeux Tapestry (September 10-July 11). But there’s also Renoir and Love at the National Gallery (October 3-January 31), Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury at Tate Britain (November 12- April 11); and Nan Goldin at the Hayward Gallery (November 24-March 7).

And who would have thought in 1981, when Girls on Film took absolute ownership of the summer, that Duran Duran would still be touring arenas 45 years later? But they are, in October, with six big UK shows culminating in a Hallowe’en Danse Macabre party at London’s O2 Arena.

Finally: I am interviewing Simon Sebag Montefiore about his masterly new book on the Middle East, The Cauldron, at Foyles on August 25; and the one and only Slavoj Žižek for How:To Academy at the Royal Geographical Society on October 13. Do come along.