Edited by Nicola Carbonara
In cinema as in the most celebrated novels of international literature, food has always inspired, enthralled, or simply constituted a key theme in many of the most successful plots of all time. Popcorn Cinema & Food is the column dedicated to films related to this theme, which have taught us important lessons about the world of gastronomy and perhaps even life...
Popcorn Cinema & Food
Joy, love, desire, curiosity: these are just some of the emotions that can be found in the kitchen. How many times has the cinema been able to channel all this better than any other medium, bringing us to feel on our skin (or rather, on our palate) an extraordinary variety of flavours and sensations that are new or already known, but in any case capable of making our heart beat faster, giving us goose bumps, or making us tremble with impatience?
At the same time, cooking is in many ways a metaphor for life, with its alchemy of different and often discordant ingredients coming together to create new flavours. With that mixture of patience and insistence needed to prepare a dough, the delicacy and strength required to create delicious dishes. The imagination that must be guided by knowledge of the ingredients and their characteristics to achieve excellent results...
All this makes cooking one of the best-loved subjects on the big screen, which becomes both bearer and interpreter of universal messages, speaking to the hearts of viewers in a familiar, familiar language, capable of conveying the most profound concepts.
Culinary metaphors: Mont Blanc or Sacher torte?
Among the most bizarre metaphors of Italian cinema, we like to open this column with a quote from Nanni Moretti, who in the film Bianca 1984 staged a cute little theatre set at the dinner table, where professor Michele Apicella, the film's protagonist and teacher sui generis high school student, scolds the host during a lunch for his wrong approach to dessert...
Michael: You do not tunnel...
Mario: What?
Michael: She is digging underneath me and removing the cream: the chestnut, alone, on top, makes no sense! Mont Blanc is not like a Sicilian cannolo, which has everything inside and like a rucksack she carries it around for a month and is safe! Mont Blanc stands on a delicate balance, it is not like Sacher Torte...
Mario: What?
Michael: The Sacher Torte...
Mario: What is it?
Michael: I mean, you have practically never tasted Sacher Torte?!
Mario: No.
Michael: All right, let's get on with it, let's get hurt!
The scene almost immediately became paradigmatic of Nanni Moretti's cinema, so much so that the director, when he founded his own film distribution company a few years later, called it Sacher Filmimmediately instituted an award for the best film of the year: the Sacher Prize.
The strange judge of other people's quirks
The jibe is probably directed at those rich families whose culture has not grown in step with their economic well-being. Or perhaps it is just a mockery of 1980s Italy, seen through the eyes of a disturbed character, but at the same time endowed with an edgy lucidity, able to observe the lives of others with detachment, standing on the sidelines and severely judging every action, attitude or oddity.
In fact, the protagonist's irreverent manner puts the characters he finds in his path in trouble, breaking down the conventions of good manners and privacy, asking intrusive questions and giving merciless opinions on everything and everyone, with no respect for form, yet following a sort of maniacal code, which does not allow for the possibility of straying from the marked path.
From real to reality
It is not difficult to find in this a precedent of many cooking reality showswhich now crowd the television channels and whose protagonists take turns judging every aspect of others' recipes, in a constant contest of extravagance and where each tries to emerge as the most knowledgeable in the field or the most artistically gifted...
Under the heading Popcorn Cinema & Food we will be able to look back over the history of international cinema month by month, examining some of the most beautiful films that, in one way or another, focus on food and its poetry. Visit us again to find out more!
English 
Italian