Claude Chabrol and Zimmi's
Dinner and a movie
A thought: what if I kept it simple and recommended just two things each week—one movie, one restaurant—plus, a handful of short takes for good measure? It’s the original moviepudding format, sort of.
Also, a genuine thank you to everyone who came out to the inaugural cinema supper club at Hudson Wilder. Tickets sold out in an hour, and it was so nice to meet some of you in real life. Consider it a trial run for the team and for me. Hopefully, more to come.
If you’d like to partner on a screening + dinner, get in touch!
SHORT TAKES
There’s a certain level of salaciousness one has come to expect from an Emerald Fennell movie, and that is woefully absent in Wuthering Heights.
Frederick Wiseman passed away last week. On Wednesday, Woodbine honors the documentarian (much more than that, really) with a screening of the 1975 film Welfare, which was shot at the Waverly Welfare Center on 14th street.
If you have not already, get throttled by the original Bugonia, aka Save the Green Planet (2003) at MoMa on Thursday.
There are still a few screenings of S&M films part of the Love is a Hurting Thing series at Spectacle, which is on record as one of my favorite theaters.
Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Lincoln Center’s annual import of France’s latest, begins March 5.
I like François Ozon’s new adaptation of The Stranger, which translates the feeling of Camus’s prose to the screen.
And Enzo: Robin Campillo directing Laurence Cantet’s final screenplay, which they wrote together.
You could also be among the first stateside to watch Alpha, Julia Ducornau’s latest.
Opening Friday: The President’s Cake. Iraq’s Oscar entry for best international feature is about a young girl of single-digit age on a Zelda-like quest for flour, sugar, and eggs amid war and scarcity. She has been ordered to bake the confection—preferably with cream, at the behest of her tyrannical teacher—in honor of Saddam Hussein. The movie is quite the opposite of treacle, a food film in negatives.
Searching for how to bake an Iraqi cake led me to Nawal Nasrallah’s rosewater-scented spicy date cake. I would show you, but I fear the plainly photographed circular slab would deter you from what was rather tasty.
Relatedly, I just received this spiced yellow-cake mix (Palestinian-inspired, adjacent in palate) from Oh, So Easy, and I think it would do the trick. The new brand centers on third cultures and immigrant communities. The ube brownies I made were excellent. Use a smaller pan than instructed; I did not get enough rise.
✍️ I’ve long been obsessed with women eating on film. I wrote about the subject for MUBI’s print issue, and it's now online. If you like this newsletter, then it should resonate.
Save the date: Related to the above, I’m talking to a special guest about a food-centric movie at BAM on March 10. I’ll let you know when tickets are on sale.
And finally, one movie and one restaurant for the week.
WEDDING IN BLOOD
TO WATCH
Claude Chabrol remains the most slyly underestimated of the French New Wave, too cool to mythologize himself, too amused by bourgeois rot to be sanctified like others. Lazily but not entirely inaccurately dubbed a French Hitchcock, he is a surgeon of the provincial psyche, and his work houses the more base elements of thrillers as he locates lewd desires amongst the airless bourgeousie.
In Wedding in Blood, a small town mayor’s wife (Stephane Audran) has an affair with one of her husband’s cabinet members (Michel Piccoli), whose own spouse is a frigid depressive (Clotilde Joano). The liaison is comically carnal, taking place in the bushes and historical property, but then grows into something more desperate. With Chabrol, sex and murder are not aberrations but outgrowths of marriage, of civic life, of the family unit itself. Restored by Tamasa. Playing tonight at L’Alliance New York.
ZIMMI’S
TO EAT
While Chabrol braids soapy melodrama with the unsavory menace of genre films, Zimmi’s practices its own combinatory magic. The food at this newish French restaurant in the West Village is a meeting of rustic and refined—dishes inherited from a country grand-mère’s table, if she had impeccable sourcing. The dishes may be brown or old-fashioned, but they are also dutifully delicious: plump, carefully stuffed cabbages, eggy noodles fortified with chicken ragout, full plates of fowl or fish, and more.
As Chabrol’s films tend to focus on the middle and lower-middle classes, they often give us glimpses into kitchens and dining rooms, and manifold tablescapes where resentment sometimes ferments alongside dinner. Cakes and tarts also recur across his work (less in Wedding in Blood, more in La Cérémonie, a subject for another day).
At Zimmi’s, pastry chef Clodagh Manning, formerly of Lyle’s in London, prepares exquisite tartes du jour that feel like a wink in this direction. Her simple but precisely executed desserts are worth a trip alone. Over the summer, I had a granita that immediately sent me…back to Sicily. I’m plotting a solo trip to the bar for a tarte salee, a glass of red, and whatever else she’s making. 72 Bedford Street.
looove this format! the zimmi’s fries look perfect
oh my god those fries....