An average movie

I have to admit that I didn’t know much/anything about Anthony Bourdain so I thought it would be pretty cool to discover him before his career actually started. Well, even though it did look pretty neat, to be honest, I actually struggled to care about the damned thing after all. I mean, the movie itself was well done and Dominic Sessa gave a solid performance, the issue was with Anthony Bourdain AKA Tony himself. Indeed, the movie started with a quote from Bourdain’s bestseller book, ‘Kitchen Confidential’, mentioning himself that he was spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless and I’m afraid he was right. He actually reminded me of how I was around the same age so I should have been able to identify with this character but, eventually, I thought the guy was just so insufferable. However, there here was a big difference between Anthony Bourdain and myself when we were around the same age though and it was the fact that Bourdain lied to everybody all the time. I was also amazed by how little cooking he ever did (Dominic Sessa admitted afterwards that his cooking skills did not really improve after making the film which wasn’t surprising). Again, I don’t know much about Bourdain, maybe he was a great guy but what I saw here was an arrogant self-centred young man who seemed rather talentless, except for making speeches about his own greatness. I was also amazed by the fact that, even though he had been so rude to Mary, he did apologize to Chef and Sal but not to her at all. In fact, even though they worked together, they had zero conversation afterwards. Eventually, she had only one line of dialogue after all to congratulate him for the clambake which was revolting. Towards the end, I have to admit that they did handle a specific detail properly. Indeed, when he was finally going to score with Nancy, the only reason why he actually ended up in this position in the first place, when he finally told her the truth, I thought at first that it was actually rather endearing and even romantic. However, my initial reaction was conditioned by decades of watching basic rom-coms during which such stalky behaviour is actually condoned and even promoted. Her rejection was actually the right way to react. And, yet, she couldn’t wait to see him again in Vassar after the summer but why exactly? The guy didn’t have any actual talent, as a writer and certainly not as a cook either. He seemed to be smart but mostly because his castrating mother taught him some difficult words when he was probably just a toddler. For the rest, he was just an empty shell who used and dropped anyone on his path (Chef, Sal, Nancy,…). While Tony was always and constantly annoying and never really interesting, Sal who obviously would never become world famous was so much more fascinating, largely thanks to Leo Woodall who always had such a magnetic presence even when playing someone who seemed to be most of the time a major a**hole. The conclusion of this movie was that Anthony Bourdain ended up being one of the most famous Chefs in the world completely by random after chasing some random girl while having no real affinity or talent towards the cooking Art and, well, it was obviously hardly satisfying. Anyway, I have to admit that it was not really bad but this movie certainly did rub me in the wrong way.