Sometimes titles say more than they intend. In Search of Israeli Cuisine seems defensive, as if director Roger Sherman is worried that his film isn’t going to find Israeli cuisine. And with that worry the movie grows progressively insistent; it presses too hard to convince its viewers that the current state of cooking in Israel is fabulous. One also might wonder whether it even matters to establish whether there is a great Israeli cuisine. As some of the chefs and foodies in the movie say directly, Israel is a young country and this aspect of culture hasn’t had time to develop, in the same way that many dishes need time to settle and blend their flavors.
At the same time, this often stiff and insecure movie finds other things that make it far more interesting than you might expect. For one, it’s a relief that a film about Israel is not about settlements, territory and conflict. Most of the chefs talk, without revealing any political or social attitudes at all, about the importance of Palestinian food in Israel. And they credit the profound contributions to Israeli eating habits from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, Libya – and also Europe. Palestinian chefs show off their cooking in the film, as do other Muslims, and it’s wonderful that at least in the world of cooking and eating, cultural resentments vanish. It’s like music.
The movie makes a tour of Israel to uncover different attitudes toward cooking, from street food that looks ready to gobble, to high-art European-style presentations with just a smidgen of foods arranged like a still-life on big white plates. And the chef’s sound as if they’ve all trained at Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse in Berkeley – every one of them stresses that food must be fresh and local. And that, most wonderfully, leads to sequences in both Israeli and Palestinian open markets with the sensual assault of colors and shapes – of tomatoes, onions, eggplants, leeks, all sorts of fruits and baskets of beans. And those images lead to dishes of wondrous variety cooked in fancy restaurants, street kitchens and homes.
But it would help if In Search of Israeli Cuisine weren’t so uptight. The tour is led by an American/Israeli chef and restaurant owner, Michael Solomonov, who currently has a restaurant in Philadelphia. He questions people about cooking, samples their foods and lets us know how good it all is. And all the while he makes sure the audience knows that cooking in Israel is really, really terrific. He should just get out of the way and let the images do their work.
All through In Search of Israeli Cuisine, I wished that the late Les Blank had made the film. Blank’s movies are about the magical, celebratory intersection of food, music and people glad to participate in both. Blank’s the maker of Always for Pleasure, Chulas Fronteras, In Heaven There Is No Beer? Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers and Yum Yum Yum, A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking.
Blank had utter confidence in the validity of the cultures he filmed. He never set out to prove a point and in his films, flowing pictures of people cooking, making music, dancing and talking speak for themselves. You can virtually smell the foods. Blank grabs the un-staged images of a young woman at an African-American rodeo in Texas dancing by herself, with a holstered gun on her hip. Or the look in the eye of a Cajun man dumping shrimp into a huge gumbo in the backyard.
In Search of Israeli Cuisine mutes the joy because it’s trying to teach the audience something that’s obvious from the sights on screen. Conversations feel forced and artificial. The architecture of the picture is heavy-handed and joyless. Perhaps in some technical way, Israeli cuisine hasn’t fully matured. That’s maybe a question for anthropologists. The images here do their work just fine.
Ess gesunder heit.
