Delicious

France, 1788. The aristocratic menu features swan ragout and roasted squab. Manceron (Grégory Gadebois), a gifted chef, loves to relieve the Duke de Chamfort’s boredom with all sorts of culinary creations. One day, however, the headstrong chef lets his imagination run wild and serves the duke’s guests a delicacy made from the humblest of ingredients—the potato. A scandal that lands Manceron directly on the street. Back at his family farm, the seasoned man faces nothing but the bleak prospect of serving dusty travelers broth and bread. Slowly, however, the remote post station begins to make a name for itself, especially when a mysterious woman named Louise (Isabelle Carré) appears on the farm and asks the master to introduce her to the art of cooking... So this is what it looks like when the sensual staging of food becomes an expression of self-determination: with a palpable love for its subject, the camera lingers on textures, colors, and movements in the kitchen, turning the culinary into a silent vehicle for inner developments. Here, taste is visualized with great verve: steaming surfaces, carefully composed plates, the rhythmic cutting and stirring—all of this creates an almost tactile intimacy. At the same time, Éric Besnard’s film works with the contrast between confinement and openness. Sterile, controlled spaces—whether in the restaurant industry or in the personal sphere—are gradually broken open by warm lighting and softer visual compositions. And this precisely mirrors the narrative of emancipation in pre-revolutionary France: freedom appears not as a sudden outburst, but as a slow, conscious rearrangement of one’s own life. Thus, “À la Carte” becomes less a classic drama and more an aesthetic space of experience, in which eating crystallizes into a metaphor for autonomy: an act of choosing, combining, and savoring—and thus a quiet but lasting path to freedom. And as if in passing, Besnard also serves up a magnificent, heartwarming story!