Burnt (2015): First Impressions

SPOILERS AHEAD!

This is not yet a polished review of the film. It's more like a rough first draft of impressions. 

 I am the complete opposite of a foodie. I have been known to eat food lacking salt and not notice. Therefore the only draw for me in this move was the potential psychological drama and redemption story.

 I started watching the movie hoping I was going to get a story about the journey on the path of Mastery (see Robert Greene, George Leonard etc). Given this expectation, I was somewhat disappointed. I will try to list out the reasons below.

1. In Rocky, we sympathise and empathise with Rocky Balboa since he is an underdog. Sure, he has some basic level of boxing skill, but he's quite far from any level of Mastery, and what's more, he's not even acquired the mindset that will draw him to take the first step on the goalless path of Mastery. He's not even an apprentice properly speaking because his heart is in it. He doubts his vocation, and Mickey rejects him as  a student initially. He is directionless and his life has stagnated - not plateaued, stagnated even before he has started, and it does not look like he will get anywhere in life unless something changes. The story does not start with a fall but rather a failure to rise. The viewer who has experienced some hard knocks in life, or who has been dealt a bad hand, cannot help identifying with Rocky Balboa, the underdog.

 Adam Jones, on the other hand, is not by any stretch an underdog when the movie begins. He's not even a mid-level dog. He's already a top dog who's aiming at becoming one of the supreme dogs. He is already a two star Michelin chef who's messed up his career. That is, he has already achieved a level of success that the average viewer is likely very far away from in his chosen profession or hobby. He's clearly past the stage of  the Apprentice and even that of the Journeyman. He has actually achieved a level of Mastery already, all of which has happened off screen before this movie even started. No matter what mistakes he might have done, his hard-earned cooking skills are not going to evaporate. He can start picking up the pieces of his life and put them together pretty fast anytime he decides to, which is exactly what happens. Right off the bat, this makes him difficult to identify with, unless you are already an overachiever. The movie starts with Bradley Cooper's voiceover (already not a good sign; what happened to show, don't tell?) explaining his fall from grace and his self-imposed penance (which seems arbitrary; perhaps there is something appropriate about shelling oysters that foodies or chefs can understand easily, but it escapes me). But once again, an opportunity to create identification is missed because when we first meet him, he is on the last day of his penance. There's really not much of a "Gonna Fly Now" montage. But as soon as we see his penance for the first time, it's over! And he is out on a quest to redeem his honour. But the arrogant way in which he acts and talks from this point does not seem to indicate his penance has taught him any humility. Once again, we are told, not shown (though in a conversation this time, not a voiceover, so that's a little better) that he is now abstaining from his addictions and from women. 

The arrogant ease with which he assembles a team and gets to become the driving force of his friends restaurant reminded me of Napoleon Hill in Outwitting the Devil, talking about how one of his ventures failed and he was at rock bottom - only to proceed to tell the reader in the next few lines how he got in touch with some friends and put together a new business venture. Anyone who has that level of skills and prestige/social-proof at his disposal does not have real problems, just minor annoyances, and do we really want to watch a hero's journey that is all about side-stepping minor annoyances.  We don't see the hero fall apart in real time. We don't see doors that slam shut in his face and refuse to open for him. We don't see him banging at those doors in futility. This is no Pursuit of Happyness.

In the 7 Habits series, both Stephen Covey and Sean Covey say that the inner battle has to be won before the external battle. By the time we meet him, Adam Jones has already won his inner battles. He just has to make this victory present in the exterior world. The most exciting and dramatic parts of this story are already over.

2. He can't seem to walk a few feet without tripping over some old friend or enemy. The plot seems contrived at this point.

3. The whole movie is about his going for the third star. I'm guessing viewers who are two star chefs will be able to identify with him, but I somehow don't. Perhaps if they had shown how he struggled with his addictions, who helped him quit and stay sober.

4. He refuses to rekindle his relationship with his old flame because she is better off without him, but does not reject getting drawn into the initiation of a relationship with Helene. True, she initiates the coming closer, not him, but I was expecting to tell Helene that she's better off without him too. Everyone is better off not getting close to him until he's exorcised his demons successfully.

 

5. The ending is a sort of Deus Ex Machina, twice. First, though his pride doesn't allow him to accept money from his friend, he is okay with his ex paying off those whom he owes money. Second, it's purely providential that those customers were not inspectors but mere software salesmen. The ending where he simply continues doing his duty instead of getting flustered and making special preparations was a nice touch. So was his not getting angry at his old friend/enemy for taking revenge on him. If only the whole of the movie had this same detachment from the fruits approach.

Climax of "A Man Escaped"

Tim Rosenberger of 25YearsLater has this to say about the climax of the film by Bresson:

I first saw A Man Escaped during a college film class. If memory serves, I found it interesting but a little boring. I also found the ending abrupt, anti-climatic and a little too easy.

Now? I still find the ending abrupt, anti-climatic and a little too easy. It’s not easy. It really isn’t. The whole film is about this prison break and the difficult lengths Fontaine goes through to make it to freedom.

But Bresson doesn’t linger enough on that last roadblock to liberation. He doesn’t milk it for all its worth. It’s maybe the one instance where I would’ve shot a little more intricately: close-ups on hands about to mess up or on Fontaine’s nervous face. That type of thing to just heighten tension one last time before the final release and resolution. Bresson could’ve accomplished this without sacrificing much of his simple aesthetic. I admire Bresson for sticking to his style from first frame to last frame, but that climatic moment needs something more. When we got to the end, I remember my college class being like, “That’s it?” I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel similar now.

But what if the supposedly flat climax was a feature and not a bug? Perhaps this scene is meant to show us that Fontaine was a man who functioned in a state of Zanshin?

There is a famous Japanese proverb that says, “After winning the battle, tighten your helmet.”

In other words, the battle does not end when you win. The battle only ends when you get lazy, when you lose your sense of commitment, and when you stop paying attention. This is zanshin as well: the act of living with alertness regardless of whether the goal has already been achieved.

Applied to this situation, Fontaine is only now out of jail. The Nazis still control France. Fontaine needs to get back to the Resistance and resume the fight against Nazis. This was why he escaped. His escape, though a good thing, can hardly have been an end in itself.

In Scott Adam's terms. He was operating in a systems perspective. He was not in perpetual failure mode.

TAG EXPLANATION: ACT too!

Of late I have been realising that most of the advice and strategies that seem workable and useful to me, which I've been encountering in self-improvement books and talks I read and watch have something in common:

They all appear to be re-workings of some or all the basic principles of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy and/or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

The purpose of this tag is to document all such instances I can find.

"All we can do is pray..."

This is what goes through my mind when I hear this:

Ideas for future development: Exulting in monotony.

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstacy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.

From Chapter 4 (The Ethics of Elfland) of Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton

Surely there is some connection here with the Jesus Prayer (and of course, the Rosary). There must be a parallel passage to this somewhere in The Way of a Pilgrim or in the Philokalia.

The Compound Effect?

    ... and presently Jack Aubrey, in a summer-house by the bowling-green, began again, playing very gently in the darkness, improvising wholly for himself, dreaming away on his violin with a mastery that Stephen had never heard equalled, though they had played together for years and years.
    Like many other sailors Jack Aubrey had long dreamed of lying in his warm bed all night long; yet although he could now do so with a clear conscience he often rose at unChristian hours, particularly if he were moved by strong emotion, and crept from his bedroom in a watch-coat, to walk about the house or into the stables or to pace the bowling-green. Sometimes he took his fiddle with him. He was in fact a better player than Stephen, and now that he was using his precious Guarnieri rather than a robust sea-going fiddle the difference was still more evident: but the Guarnieri did not account for the whole of it, nor anything like. Jack certainly concealed his excellence when they were playing together, keeping to Stephen's mediocre level: this had become perfectly clear when Stephen's hands were at last recovered from the thumbscrews and other implements applied by French counterintelligence officers in Minorca; but on reflexion Stephen thought it had been the case much earlier, since quite apart from his delicacy at that period, Jack hated showing away.
    Now, in the warm night, there was no one to be comforted, kept in countenance, no one who could scorn him for virtuosity, and he could let himself go entirely; and as the grave and subtle music wound on and on, Stephen once more contemplated on the apparent contradiction between the big, cheerful, florid sea-officer whom most people liked on sight but who would never have been described as subtle or capable of subtlety by any one of them (except perhaps his surviving opponents in battle) and the intricate, reflective music he was now creating. So utterly unlike his limited vocabulary in words, at times verging upon the inarticulate.
    'My hands have now regained the moderate ability they possessed before I was captured,' observed Maturin, 'but his have gone on to a point I never thought he could reach: his hands and his mind. I am amazed. In his own way he is the secret man of the world; but I wish his music were happier.'

From The Commodore by Patrick O'Brian (Book 17 of the Aubrey-Maturin series)

Is this perhaps what Darren Hardy and Jeff Olsen described in their books?

Ideas for Future Development: "Eternal Rome" & the "Church Invisible"

During a conversation with a friend, I was asked, "How is the concept of 'Eternal Rome' that some traditionalist Catholics espouse not the same as the idea of the 'Church Invisble' as posited by the Protestants?"

I've been thinking about this for a while, and one difference that strikes me right off the bat is this:

1. In the teaching of the Protestant Reformers, the "Church Invisible" seems to be a feature of the Church.

2. In the ideas of Traditionalist Catholics, the discord between "Eternal Rome" and the current Papacy+Curia is an unfortunate bug that should be resolved as soon as possible.