The Menu
As unabashedly leftist as Triangle of Sadness, but more hilarious. I see that all these stem from Parasite, that critique of high class using all the Voss water bottles and shit. This is more allegorical, there’s at least one kind of bad people burning in end.
Anya Taylor-Joy is the audience surrogate, a regular people smack in the middle of grade-A upper class twits, ladies and gentleman, disco shit. Since that’s left to the imagination, the precise relationship between the main couple seems weird but within the realm of expectation. The guy is a complete foodie nerd, the first sign of real weirdness is when they get there and the reservation is not in her name. The guy doesn’t know her name either…
Turns out she’s really an hostess, a Call Girl, a courtesan. Besides the food nerd guy, there’s the older couple who visited the restaurant 11 times (but can’t name a single plate), the three tech bros who want to splurge, the fading movie star and his sassy assistant, and finally, the glossy magazine reviewer and her sycophant editor. Crème de la crème of upper class idiots, I agree.
The chef is introduced as a cult leader, and the clients also drank the Kool Aid. His minions would literally take a bullet for him, a self-inflicted one even. That’s fine because everybody will die anyway, it needs to be that way, the menu doesn’t work otherwise.
The only snag is the courtesan. She wasn’t supposed to be here, the chef pities her since she’s a fellow service worker, but she has to earn her life. Even mentioning that evening she spent with the regular client jerking off into her while keeping eye contact, while she pretends to be her daughter doesn’t clinch it.
What finally cracks that dictatorial shell is a dare, the chef is so far removed from his burger flipping days he can’t even cook a proper cheeseburger now. Turns out he can, and for allowing him to cook a meal with love for someone else, for giving him that particular nugget of humanity, our courtesan is allowed to live and watch from the boat as the whole thing blows up in the end. That’s a satisfying cheeseburger.
The connection to Snowpiercer is clear, but Willy Wonka? The cheeseburger is the gobstopper, etc etc etc.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.