First off, Sofia Vergara has the most incredible body (Vergara the Viagra?), and while, for the majority of the film, she is adorned in colourful, figure hugging clothes that show off her amazing curves, for the one scene in which she wears a t-shirt in a fast food fan, she still manages to look like she is in designer clothing made to emphasise her everything.
When I could rip your eyes away from her, I was able to appreciate the number of other famous faces appearing in Jon Favreau’s (relatively) low budget film Chef. There is Favreau himself as the tattoo-adorned Chef Carl Casper who finds himself stifled working at a restaurant owned by Dustin Hoffman and so strikes out to re-find himself and to bond with his son in a Cuban food truck. Along the way, they run into Robert Downey Jr (being himself, I think), Scarlett Johnansson (I love that, as the sexy, sultry, tattooed Maitre d’, she is seduced by cooking), and John Leguizamo as Casper’s loyal cooking aid, Martin.
The story is straight forward, told like it was prepared in a slow cooker, and it pays to eat before going in to a screening, considering the range of meats, pastas, sandwiches and desserts that are prepared and slowly cooked in front of you. While embracing traditional and low-tech cooking techniques, the film also revels in the use of Twitter and a whole host of other IPhone Apps (I hope they got a lot of sponsorship from them!) and how they can be used to publicise and at times destroy a business. Some of it went completely over my head (I am not a Tweeter and the whole flashmob thing I find a little distasteful for some reason), but for the purposes of the film, and as a tool to show how the son could really help his father, it worked incredibly well.
As mentioned, the film does not progress quickly, and while you know from the poster that Casper will end up in a food truck, it takes about an hour for him to get anywhere near one. There are easy laughs throughout, a few painfully cliché moments (a group sing along to a song on the car radio rarely works, and it barely does here) and Vergara shows up every so often, upping the class factor whenever she does so. There are visits to Miami, New Orleans, Texas on the way back to LA, and a strange, overlong encounter with a cop at Long Beach which probably could have been totally excised and you would never have known the difference. There are also many shots of extras who seem to have very little acting training as fast food customers who occasionally look right into the camera or have the slightly worried look of a person who knows they are on camera, knows that they are not the centre of attention, and are self conscious of their presence nonetheless.
But overall it is hard to dislike this film. It is a little slow, but there are no real dull moments. There are a lot of big names, but they are well used (unlike Grand Budapest Hotel, not that I am dissing that film, but there were lots of more or less pointless cameos there). There is lots of food, and it all looks scrumptious and I wish I was able to both cook and chop like that. And there is lots of Vergara, though there could always be more.
Verdict: Chef is a great little film, completely different in pace from the big blockbuster films that are dominating the cineplexes at the moment and all the more refreshing for it. With an amazing cast, and Favreau telling the tale he wants at the speed he wants, the film, like the food, comes across as a labour of love that everyone involved appreciated. 4 Michelin stars out of 5.
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