Georges Perrier (AFIDocs)This year’s AFI Docs lineup features a typically diverse array of subjects, some of which are bound to catch your eye. In some cases, they may catch your stomach as well. Two films in this year’s festival are of particular interest to area foodies; one may not break out of its niche market, but the other is more than just a movie about food.
King Georges follows Lyon-born Georges Perrier as his iconic Philadelphia restaurant Le Bec-Fin struggles after forty years in business. Director Erika Frankel has intimate access to the restaurant’s kitchen in a time of crisis, and Perrier is not afraid to call his frantic staff “fucking assholes” on camera. As one critic notes, there was a time when patrons in Le Bec-Fin’s dining room would hear the chef’s famous temper and make the excuse that “he’s just being French!”
But in an age when patrons want their steak tartare cooked medium-rare and when professional decorum is not sacrificed to culinary genius, cranky old school quirks are just cranky and old. Up-and-coming chef Nicholas Elmi may be Le Bec-Fin’s final hope. Can Perrier sustain his vision in a restaurant scene that seems to have left him behind? Anyone who follows Philadelphia food will know the answer. King Georges is a valuable look at the working process of an old-school French chef from early morning market visit to kitchen drama—and it will make you drool for his crab cakes—but the film is unlikely to seduce anyone who doesn’t happily watch The Food Network for hours on end.
King Georges screens Friday, June 19 at 12 p.m. at Landmark’s E Street Cinema, followed by a Q&A with director Erika Frankel; and Saturday June 20 at 11:15 a.m. at the AFI Silver Theater, followed by Q&A with Frankel and chefs Georges Perrier and Nicholas Elmi.
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Jonathan Gold (AFI Docs)City of Gold is director Laura Gabbert’s portrait of Los Angeles Times food critic Jonathan Gold. But even though the film’s technique is straightforward, it reaches far beyond the dining table. Gabbert introduces Gold as a Falstaffian nerd sitting down at his laptop, which may suggests the image of the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. But Gold is not only a good writer but a generous one, and has earned his fanbase by championing the kinds of restaurants that, according to the film, few critics were writing about at the time: the hundreds of independent L.A. eateries driven by a constant and ever-changing stream of immigrants.
Gold doesn’t just write about restaurants but about the stories behind the people who dream of sharing their culture in a strange land. Gold was a failed musician turned music critic—a stint as a cellist at UCLA took an unexpected turn to L.A. punk (he briefly played in the band Overman). Bizarre Foods host Andrew Zimmern speaks of an American cultural tendency that breeds “contempt without investigation,” but Gold investigates everything, his musical tastes sampled on a KCRW guest DJ spot that careened from The Germs to Dr. Dre to Elizabethan composer John Downland, who composed what Gold describes as the ‘Stairway to Heaven” of 1620.
This kind of all-encompassing curiosity goes to food as obscure as deer penis and as common as hot dogs (well, let’s hope the twain don’t meet). The writer notes his debt to New Yorker’s Calvin Trillin, whose method of finding a decent place to eat in a strange town resonated with Gold: as Trillin asked motel clerks where to eat, he’d grab them by the necktie (this being an age when motel clerks wore neckties) and emphasizing, “Not the place you took your parents on their 25th wedding anniversary. The first place you went the night you came home after thirteen months in Korea.”
City of Gold is an excellent documentary about food and immigration, about a city and a delicious melting pot that makes it the envy of any foodie. But before you book a red-eye, it may make you wonder about the immigrant cuisines in your own backyard. It’s an inspiring film, not just for a food writer but for any writer and for anyone who eats food, which means you.
City of Gold screens Saturday, June 20 at 4:15 p.m. at Landmark E Street Cinema.
