Ostensibly the film is about food and the preparation of food and how people get on with each other while preparing food.
But I don’t think that’s what the film is actually about.
An important character in the film dies part way through and another important character mourns the loss.
And now take a step back and ask – how does a filmmaker or an author show the depth of the relationship that existed for which the loss is now felt, the loss of the wonder of the other person?
So I think that the concentration on the cooking of food, the technicalities of making food, the technicalities which showed the characters and skills and attention to detail – all of these were outward manifestations of relationship.
Long protestations of love are in the end just protestations, but the ballet of their movements together shows something deeper.
I don’t know if it’s a novel way, but it’s a clever way of showing the dual experience of the everyday and a more subtle experience. The everyday experience of cooking something that’s essential to life, and the higher experience of joining with someone. Through that we can feel that the relationship is deep, founded on solid ground, and meaningful. So we can believe the loss is real.
There was another thread, which was that the food preparation was very real. We see them pull the guts out of a fish, and then out of a chicken. We see them scald the skin off the blackened feet of the chicken and scrape the skin off a sole or turbot. No neatly presented packages of food from the supermarket, because the film was set at about the turn of the 20th century and mass produced food was far off into the future.
So we get to look into a more raw, more real, more elemental past and to be wistful about what we have lost in the modern world. I think that’s what the film was about. It was about loss.