C&C 43: SIFF Food & Drink Edition
A quartet of culinary documentaries, plus a cocktail
I’m back with a second round of coverage of the Seattle International Film Festival, wrapping up its fiftieth iteration on Sunday. (A week-long streaming version of the fest, featuring many of this year’s films, kicks off on Monday.) Round one was about crime. Now the focus shifts to cocktails, by which I mean food and drink. These movies are about location, touching on and expanding the concept of terroir. The idea is taken from the world of enology, so we might as well begin there.
Rioja, The Land of a Thousand Wines (Spain) is a portrait of a region and its signature industry. Too often, films like this can seem like travelogues sponsored by the local tourist board, and José Luis Lopez-Linares’s documentary features its share of gorgeous slow-motion shots of flowing wine and cascading grapes, not to mention breathtaking vistas. But the film does a good job of explaining the significance of the land, the “wonderful interplay of climates” creating three distinct zones within Rioja that has led Tim Atkin, the noted wine authority who appears on camera, to call it a “sleeping lion” that is one of the world’s best wine regions. Lopez-Linares weaves in the area’s history, like its long tradition of welcoming pilgrims and the arrival of French vintners after their own vineyards were destroyed by phylloxera in the mid-nineteenth century to transform the local approach to wine. He also has an eye for images that subvert expectations, as when he follows up the standard shot of workers stomping grapes with one revealing the scale of the vat in which they’re standing and the almost architectural nature of the process, with various strata of crushed fruit a dozen or more feet deep. The film closes with an impressive sequence of a vertical tasting at the Marqués de Riscal winery, as bottles are opened in the order that they were made beginning over 150 years ago. The documentary satisfyingly explores the cultures of both wine and Rioja, underscoring how deeply the two are linked. And if it has the side effect of making you want to pour a glass or even book a flight to Spain, so what?
The emphasis is local in Isaac Olsen’s Rainier: A Beer Odyssey. For years the brand was hugely popular in Washington State, regularly outselling better-known labels like Budweiser. This documentary is about the freewheeling advertising campaign responsible for its success. Better that than focus on the middling beer itself; as people who crafted the Rainier ads attest, their efforts “had nothing to do with the quality of the product,” because the choices available during the 1970s and ‘80s “were all pretty much the same.” (I’ve had Rainier. It’s fine. I never think to order it. In bars lately, it’s been hard to come by.) The Seattle firm of Heckler, Bowker—later Heckler Associates—comes across like a disco-era Sterling Cooper Draper Price from Mad Men, a tight-knit shop founded by refugees from magazine journalism and staffed by people with nontraditional backgrounds. Their idiosyncratic strategy was to make Rainier “a friendly beer” by tapping into the zeitgeist, to “try to leverage things that were going on and make them kind of Northwesty.” The result was a series of spots that looked like “Weird Al” Yankovic was heading up marketing: parodies of Star Wars, Chariots of Fire, Amadeus, and Rambo, with one contributor saying that the agency was “like (Saturday Night Live) but we had better writers.” Other ads starred Mickey Rooney—then “between comebacks” in the words of agency cofounder Gordon Bowker—as pitchman, wooed with a highjacked room-service cart full of suds and paid with a new car to sidestep his alimony debt. Most of the commercials included the Rainiers, human-sized “free range” bottles of beer. Seattle comedian John Keister explains that the ads “built a comic language … created their own universe.” Olsen’s film tries to work in a similarly irreverent vein, with a framing device sending up Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Not the hippest reference, but one with a history in the Rainier ads and that will appeal to the movie’s demographic. Rainier: A Beer Odyssey tells a Seattle story—the slow fade of Boeing and the rise of Starbucks are integral parts of it—but also an instructive, universal one about capitalism, how building a strong local brand can create boundless good will and how outsiders who purchase it will ultimately misunderstand and ruin it. The film may only be for completists given its two-plus-hour running time, but considering the Rainier merchandise collectors and the jubilation when the trademark R returned to the brewery’s rooftop, they’re out there.
Billy Dec, subject of the documentary Food Roots, is a successful Chicago restaurateur and nightclub impresario with a side hustle as an actor. We see clips of him on Friends, Empire, and Chicago Fire, along with him being thanked by then-President Barack Obama. Dec would appear to have it all, but he kept his Filipino heritage at arm’s length growing up. Now, in the wake of family tragedies and the growing acceptance of the Philippines’ cuisine in fine dining, he journeys back to learn the recipes that his elders never wrote down. Less than an hour long, Food Roots feels slight, a combination of vanity project—Dec produced Michele Josue’s film, along with fellow Filipino-American apl.de.ap of the band Black Eyed Peas—and extended segment of a TV newsmagazine, the kind where Dec would be asked to change the names of the Filipino dishes he prepared in order to make them more accessible to viewers. Anthony Bourdain is clearly a huge influence on Dec’s on-camera style. But there are enough segments charged with genuine emotion, as when he unearths family secrets from a relative while making her preferred version of lumpia or receives a tattoo from a centenarian artist who hammers a pomelo thorn into his flesh, to make the trip worth taking.
While the first three films spotlight specific locales, Susan Feniger. Forked—yes, that is the punctuation—is instead about finding one’s place. As a chef, Feniger, alongside her creative partner Mary Sue Milliken, hit dizzying heights, anointed by Julia Child, triumphing as the hosts of the Food Network series Too Hot Tamales, and opening multiple acclaimed eateries in Los Angeles. Forked chronicles her efforts to launch an establishment of her own. The documentary, directed by Feniger’s spouse Liz Lachman, is billed as a “culinary disaster film,” the opening crawl promising mayhem and advising viewers to “buckle up.” But the claims are misleading; a single episode of The Bear serves up more piping hot chaos. The film chronicles Feniger’s efforts to open an L.A. restaurant specializing in Asian street food, aptly named Street. We watch as she oversees the near-demolition of the space she acquires, debates the size and shape of the dining tables, and cooks endless batches of fudge attempting to find one to include on the dessert menu. Throughout this process, and on her jaunts to Vietnam and Shanghai seeking inspiration, she remains remarkably even-keeled. The film could have benefitted from a chronology; only a split-second glimpse of a newspaper article informs the viewer that Street eventually opened in 2009. It’s no spoiler to reveal that the restaurant shuttered four years later, a victim of Feniger being ahead of the curve, with the food she offered now being commonplace. If anything, Street’s fate could have been introduced earlier, the better to dig into the question of whether the restaurant truly was a failure and to study how Feniger regained her confidence. Whatever the circumstance, high or low, she remains an engaging presence and a lively guide.
What I’m Drinking
No cocktails in the films that I saw at this year’s fest, so I’ll provide one myself. My friend Murray Stenson used to advise Boulevardiers in the winter, Old Pals in the summer. They’re both rye/Campari drinks, the former made with sweet vermouth, the latter dry. Murray’s true preference as the weather turned warm was a Pen Pal, a variation created by Gal Karni at Washington, DC’s barmini that substitutes Aperol for Campari, resulting in a more mellow taste. I’ve tinkered with it further, swapping in blanc vermouth to keep those good vibes coming. I know it’s still only spring, but I’m getting my summer mood on early.
The Pen Pal (Vince’s version)
1 ½ oz. rye whiskey
¾ oz. Aperol
¾ oz. blanc vermouth
Stir. Strain. Garnish with a lemon twist.