Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 88 Shares129 Views

    in Music

    Review: The Philharmonic Feasts on ‘The Planets’

    Under Dima Slobodeniouk, the orchestra played works by Holst and Ligeti and, for the first time, Julia Perry’s somber “Stabat Mater.”Holst’s “The Planets” is one of the Thanksgiving feasts of classical music. It seduces with variety of color and texture — just as tangy cranberry compote refreshes after buttery mashed potatoes — but tends to leave you overstuffed.I’ve never heard it when it wasn’t at least a little too much. But, played with vigor by the New York Philharmonic under Dima Slobodeniouk on Wednesday evening at David Geffen Hall, it didn’t have me moaning with overindulgence, as some “Planets” performances do. It felt like an ideal way to ring in a holiday that’s all about bounty.There was punchiness in “Mars” and genuine playfulness in “Mercury,” and Slobodeniouk was agile in guiding the orchestra through the hairpin transitions of “Jupiter.” That section’s noble hymn theme was less strings-heavy than usual, flowing with ease.That Ligeti’s “Atmosphères” is, like “The Planets,” indelibly associated with the extraterrestrial is due less to its title than to its inclusion (without its composer’s permission) in the soundtrack of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”Written in 1961, not quite half a century after Holst’s tone poem, the sumptuously eerie “Atmosphères” on Wednesday felt a bit like the son or grandson of “The Planets.” Ligeti’s queasily unsettled sound world seemed a direct descendant of the stunned stillness at the start of “Saturn,” the uneasy simmering after the march drops out in “Uranus” and the gaseous, hovering mystery of “Neptune.” Neither of these works was played with super-polish at Geffen, but under Slobodeniouk both had vibrant drama.Those tried and true “Planets” aside, this wasn’t a concert of chestnuts. The orchestra revived “Atmosphères” to cap its commemorations this fall of Ligeti’s centennial; it hasn’t presented the piece (except as it’s excerpted in the “2001” score) since 1978. And it is performing Julia Perry’s 1951 “Stabat Mater” this week for the first time ever.Perry’s brief “Study for Orchestra” was, in 1965, the first music by a Black woman to be played on a Philharmonic subscription program. It was brought back last year, but the “Stabat Mater,” scored for strings and a vocalist, is a far more powerful work. Heated yet subtle and restrained, the piece’s 10 sections on a Latin text, lasting about 20 minutes in all, chart an intimate drama whose moments of grandeur are all the more effective given the overall modesty.In the short prelude, light yet pungent pizzicato plucks — amid brooding low strings and an elegiac solo violin — movingly evoke Jesus’s mother’s tears without feeling too obvious. Throughout, Perry gives both voice and orchestra an appealing combination of Neo-Baroque angularity and post-Romantic warmth. The quivering, high-pitched flames of “the fire of love” near the end are reminders that this piece and “Atmosphères” date from the same era.The mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges sang with oracular authority in the somber vocal lines, rising to flashes of intensity. There were passages in which a more encompassing, contralto-style richness in the low register would have filled out this music. But Bridges’s focused tone was just right for Perry’s poignant austerity.The violinist Sheryl Staples, in the concertmaster chair, played with sweetness and eloquence in both the “Stabat Mater” and Holst’s “Venus.” That section of “The Planets” also featured a beautifully mellow flute solo by Alison Fierst, leading into rhapsodic lines from the orchestra’s longtime principal cello, Carter Brey.Oh, and for at least one night, the “fireflies” — the lights over the Geffen stage that do a flickering up-and-down dance before concerts, in corny imitation of the chandeliers that rise before curtain at the Metropolitan Opera next door — were stilled.Might they stay that way forevermore? That would be something to be thankful for.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

  • 75 Shares99 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Smoke Sauna Sisterhood’ Review: Women, Uninterrupted

    In Anna Hints’s bewitching documentary, Estonian smoke saunas beget a sweaty purification process — one that’s revealed to be more than skin deep.In Estonia, the smoke sauna is an 800-year-old tradition carried out with regularity — to this day — by the Voro community in the southeastern part of the country.Singled out by UNESCO as one of the world’s great cultural heritages (like the baguette in France or shadow puppetry in China), the Estonian practice begets a sweaty purification process — one that’s revealed to be more than skin deep in Anna Hints’s bewitching documentary, “Smoke Sauna Sisterhood.”Hints, whose grandmother introduced her to the smoke-sauna ritual, uses the documentary to speak volumes about what it means to be a woman, even as the focus remains fixed on a single location: a cramped sauna-cabin located in a forest.Inside the womblike sauna, Hints simply lets the women, who are primarily middle-aged and older, speak freely among themselves, just as they’re accustomed to doing; she doesn’t bother with title cards or other forms of contextualization. The women talk about their bodies, their relationships with men and the difficulties of growing up in a patriarchal society. One woman, her face obscured by her arm as she lies on the sauna bench, shares a horrific story about being raped as a teenager. The others listen attentively, providing the speaker with the compassionate audience she never had in her youth.Most of the subjects have chosen to remain anonymous, so Hints and the cinematographer Ants Tammik film the nude women from the neck down or using disembodied close-ups. Contrary to what one might expect, the focus on bare chests, perspiring backs and stretches of glistening skin doesn’t feel provocative.Instead, these raw bodies exhibit an organic kind of beauty, real and uninhibited as they commune with the swirling smoke from burning wood and the clouds of steam produced by moistened rocks. It’s no wonder the women tend to open up under these sweltering conditions. To feel fully aware of one’s own body is to acknowledge its scars, too.Smoke Sauna SisterhoodNot rated. In Estonian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

  • 100 Shares149 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Against the Tide’ Review: Tales of the Sea

    Sarvnik Kaur’s breathtaking documentary about Indigenous fishermen in Mumbai brings to life an ecosystem wrecked by corporate greed and climate change.“Against the Tide, ” Sarvnik Kaur’s breathtaking documentary about Indigenous fishermen in Mumbai, India, dispels the myth that cinematic beauty has to do with the power of the camera or the glossiness of the image. Shot by Ashok Meena, the film finds beauty, simply, in perspective.The camera looks down from above at a baby held gingerly between the knees of a grandmother as she rubs oil on his skin. It tilts gently upward on a boat that ventures into a roiling sea in the dark; it peers into a bucket of fish crowded by hands holding cash, as a seller barks his prices. In each frame, the right vantage point yields a revelatory view.Kaur tells the entangled stories of two fishermen from the Koli community. Rakesh, who lives in a cramped house with his wife, mother-in-law and newborn child, struggles to sustain a living with ancestral fishing practices. The more ambitious Ganesh employs giant deep-sea boats and LED lights (banned in many parts of India) to attract fish, but is still besieged by debt. As the two friends navigate work, manage their households and argue over late-night cups of tea, the camera stays close and loose, more like a quiet listener than a voyeur.The film avoids easy binaries of tradition and modernity, and instead brings to vivid life the ecosystem that encompasses both Rakesh and Ganesh — one that has been wrecked by corporate greed and climate change. Their only choice is between bad and worse, and if this makes the film rather bleak, the two men’s prickly yet undying friendship (centered by Kaur in another keen perspectival decision) warms the movie like a fire.Against the TideNot rated. In Hindi and Marathi, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

  • 88 Shares149 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Frybread Face and Me’ Review: Reservation Summer

    An 11-year-old boy from San Diego goes to live with his Navajo grandmother and spends time with his cousin.“Frybread Face and Me” is set in 1990, when its protagonist, Benny (Keir Tallman), reluctantly goes to live on a Navajo reservation with his maternal grandmother (Sarah H. Natani). Having grown up in San Diego, the 11-year-old Benny has more experience with action figures, SeaWorld visits and Fleetwood Mac tunes than with rug weaving, sheep herding and bull riding. Over the kind of indelible summer beloved by screenwriters, he will receive an introduction to all three.It helps that Benny is quickly joined at his grandmother’s by a cousin of a similar age; she is widely known by the nickname Frybread Face (Charley Hogan). Fry acts as a translator with their grandmother (who has refused to learn English), teaches Benny a few Navajo concepts and even gives him a driving lesson. The cultural exchange goes both ways: Fry is enthused to learn that Benny can visit the orca Shamu at SeaWorld whenever he wants.Some complexity is introduced through one of Benny’s uncles, Marvin (Martin Sensmeier), who cruelly needles Benny for not being enough of a man (and whose own toughness is called into question after he is hurt in a riding mishap).But “Frybread Face and Me,” written and directed by Billy Luther, who has previously made documentaries and worked on AMC’s “Dark Winds,” declines, to its credit, to overplay that hand. It’s more interested in sharing on details so specific (a meal of Spam and potatoes; repeated viewings of a “Starman” videotape) they seem drawn from memory. The movie is overfamiliar and earnest, but you can’t accuse it of not being heartfelt.Frybread Face and MeNot rated. In English and Navajo, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch on Netflix and in theaters. More

  • 88 Shares159 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Napoleon’ Review: A Lumpy, Grumpy Little Man

    Joaquin Phoenix is oddly mesmerizing as the French emperor in Ridley Scott’s historical epic charting his rise and ruin.When he was in his mid-20s and first visited the studio where he would late shoot “Citizen Kane,” Orson Welles is said to have likened the movies to the best electric train set a boy could have. Welles is a defining inspiration for Ridley Scott, who is best known for monumentally scaled historical epics like “Gladiator” and “Kingdom of Heaven.” In these movies as well as in his latest spectacle, “Napoleon,” Scott plays, to push Welles’s metaphor further, with the biggest train sets conceivable — giant, beautiful, gleaming machines that can, by turns, transport and overwhelm you. He’s a heavy metal guy.“Napoleon” is a very big movie, as you would expect given that it follows its title subject from the bloody delirium of the French Revolution to battlefields across Europe, Africa and, catastrophically, into Russia. More startling, though, is that the movie is also often eccentric and at times eccentrically funny. You expect refined craft and technique from Scott and the pleasures of spectacle filmmaking at its most expansive. You expect heft, seriousness, not snort-out-loud humor, which I guess explains why, while watching the movie, I flashed on Karl Marx’s axiom about history being first tragedy and then farce.It opens in Paris amid that convulsion of violence called the Terror, with surging, shouting crowds and the metallic hiss of the falling guillotine blade. Aristocrats are losing their heads (Scott re-creates one execution with gory verisimilitude), and Napoleon Bonaparte — a mesmerizing, off-kilter, lumpish Joaquin Phoenix — will soon profit from the chaos. Before long, the story has jumped forward and now Napoleon is in the southern French port city of Toulon, where he strategically routs the Anglo-Spanish fleet that has taken the city.Scott establishes Napoleon’s early rise to power with bold imagery and brusque narrative economy, vividly setting the historical moment with scenes from both inside the corridors of revolutionary power — enter Robespierre — and the surging anarchy out in the streets. Napoleon’s rise at this point is largely facilitated by the politician Paul Barras (Tahar Rahim), a silky operator with the pacific mien of a patiently lurking predator and an inescapable aristocratic hauteur. Everyone addresses one another as Citizen, which, in Barras’s case comes across as the 18th-century version of performative political correctness. Together, Barras and Napoleon consolidate their positions. Exit Robespierre.Joséphine (a fine Vanessa Kirby) makes her entrance soon after, catching Napoleon’s notice (her décolletage helps) and ushering in the story’s second plotline. A widow whose husband lost his head during the Terror, Joséphine has been recently released from prison, an ordeal that has left her with short, choppy hair and a very keen sense of self-preservation. It’s not at all clear what she actually sees in Napoleon, other than his uniform, growing reputation and obvious interest in her. She’s (relatively) poor for a society woman and has children, so desperation plays a role, though the movie suggests that what Joséphine truly sees is power.After Joséphine appears, the movie soon bifurcates into two lines of action, one involving Napoleon’s military campaigns, and the other the couple’s relationship. This kind of dual plot structure is a familiar template of old Hollywood that features two entwined strands — involving adventure and romance — that together bring everything to a close. What’s unusual here is how separate the lines of action remain in “Napoleon” and how they don’t as much interconnect as run on parallel tracks. When he’s not facing off against the Austrians, the British and the Russians, Napoleon is struggling with Joséphine, who vexes him almost as much as the Duke of Wellington (an amusing Rupert Everett).Written by David Scarpa, the movie tracks Napoleon’s relentless rise to despotic power — he crowns himself emperor — amid political intrigues, bloody battlefields and some occasional hasty rutting with Joséphine, who invariably cuts him down to size. He’s a little man, you are regularly reminded, and his relationship with Joséphine (who soon and understandably takes a lover) makes him smaller. Periodic bits of text function as de facto chapter headings, grounding the story’s chronology and announcing the next conflagration. Historical figures come and go (Paul Rhys plays Talleyrand), but for the most part the movie slides over the complexities of both the revolution and Napoleon’s reign as well as the reasons France has been swept up in endless battles on so many fronts.The war scenes are extraordinary, vigorous, harrowing and rightly grotesque. The tremendous scale of some of these battles helps give them their visceral power, as does Scott’s complex staging and use of masses of human actors and horses. With cannon blasts, bursts of smoke and the sights and sounds of armies of men thundering over fields toward their deaths, he conveys the frenzy of war, its heat and terror. As the fighting grimly continues, and the body count mounts, the absolute waste of it all becomes overwhelming, which is, I imagine, why Scott seems so uninterested in Napoleon’s vaunted military genius.“Napoleon” is consistently surprising partly because it doesn’t conform to the conventions of mainstream historical epics, which is especially true of its startling, adamantly unromanticized title character. (The movie also doesn’t always conform to the historical record, and some may take issue with the portrayal of the Battle of Austerlitz.) In the early scenes, Napoleon seems to be another of Phoenix’s taciturn, unnervingly volatile, enigmatically damaged, violent men. The difference is that this Napoleon, with his bloat, scowls and consuming needs, often resembles nothing as much as an angrily petulant baby, one whose cruelty and pathological vanity make the horror he unleashes unnervingly familiar.NapoleonRated R for intense scenes of war. Running time: 2 hours 38 minutes. In theaters. More

  • 138 Shares109 Views

    in Music

    Daryl Hall Is Suing John Oates. Over What Is a Mystery.

    The duo, whose songs regularly appeared on the top of the charts, is embroiled in some kind of legal dispute, but a judge in Tennessee has sealed the court file.With a string of No. 1 hits like “Rich Girl, “Maneater” and “She’s Gone” in the 1970s and ’80s, followed by a more recent cultural resurgence, Daryl Hall and John Oates have long been one of pop music’s most celebrated duos.But over the decades, there have been hints that things were not entirely copacetic between the two men whose names are almost always uttered in sequence. (Oates is the one with the famous mustache.) In the ’80s the group went on hiatus, and both members have at times pursued solo work. In 2020, they announced plans for a 19th studio album, but it never came to fruition; this year, the musicians performed separate tours.Now, the discord is undeniable as Hall, 77, has filed a lawsuit in Nashville against Oates, 75, the partner with whom he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. Because a judge allowed the complaint to be filed earlier this month under seal, details on the disagreement are scant, but court records classify it as a contract lawsuit.Lawyers for the two men did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The lore of Hall and Oates dates back to 1967, when the musicians were students at Temple University. As Oates tells it in his 2017 memoir, both men were performing in separate bands at a sock hop in Philadelphia when gunfire broke out and they ended up in a service elevator together. A few weeks later, Oates’s band split up after two of its members joined the military, and Hall invited Oates to play guitar for his group. Later on, they started writing music together, landing a deal with Atlantic Records in 1972 that propelled them to pop stardom.“John and I decided when we first came together as kids that we were both going to share the stage,” Hall, who has generally been seen as the principal writer and lead singer of the duo, told Classic Pop Magazine last year. “And that’s really the way that both of us have treated our careers.”Known for their soulful music and bountiful heads of hair, the duo gained cultural cachet when their music became frequently sampled by hip-hop artists. Though their most recent studio album was a Christmas-themed effort in 2006, new generations have been exposed to their songs through TV and film placements: See Joseph Gordon Levitt’s elated strut to “You Make My Dreams” in “(500) Days of Summer.”Hall and Oates have performed together often in recent years, including in a visit to the White House in 2015 and on their band’s most recent tour in 2021. In an interview that year with GQ, Oates said that he and his collaborator had “way more ups than downs,” adding, “It’s actually a miracle, I’m actually shocked that we are able to still play together and it’s great. It’s something that you have to really appreciate.” More

  • 125 Shares149 Views

    in Music

    Former Model Sues Axl Rose, Accusing Him of 1989 Rape

    Sheila Kennedy filed a complaint in New York State Supreme Court that says the Guns N’ Roses singer “overpowered” her in a hotel room. A lawyer for Mr. Rose said “this incident never happened.”Axl Rose of the band Guns N’ Roses was sued on Wednesday by a woman who accused him of dragging her by the hair, tying her up and raping her in a New York hotel in 1989.The suit was filed in New York State Supreme Court, in Manhattan, by Sheila Kennedy, a former model who has appeared in Penthouse magazine. She accused Mr. Rose of sexual assault and battery, and her suit seeks unspecified damages.Ms. Kennedy’s suit is the latest in a series of cases against powerful men that have been brought under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that created a one-year window for people who say they were victims of sexual abuse to file civil suits after the statute of limitations has expired. That window ends this week.In recent weeks, such cases have been filed against Steven Tyler of Aerosmith; the music executive L.A. Reid; and Neil Portnow, the former head of the organization behind the Grammy Awards. Last Thursday, the singer Cassie filed an explosive suit against Sean Combs — the producer and executive also known as Diddy and Puff Daddy — but it was settled in one day. (Mr. Portnow has denied the accusation; Mr. Tyler and Mr. Reid have not responded. A lawyer for Mr. Combs said that the settlement was “in no way an admission of wrongdoing.”)In a statement, Alan S. Gutman, a lawyer for Mr. Rose, said: “Simply put, this incident never happened.” He added: “Though he doesn’t deny the possibility of a fan photo taken in passing, Mr. Rose has no recollection of ever meeting or speaking to the Plaintiff, and has never heard about these fictional allegations prior to today.”In her suit, Ms. Kennedy says she met Mr. Rose in early 1989, when she went to a New York nightclub with a friend who was a fan of Guns N’ Roses. The band was at perhaps the peak of its fame — and its members relished their reputations as hard-partying bad boys — but Ms. Kennedy says in her suit that at the time she did not know who Mr. Rose was.According to Ms. Kennedy’s complaint, Mr. Rose invited her and another woman to a party at his suite in a hotel on Central Park West, where he offered them cocaine and alcohol. According to the complaint, the party “was in full swing” until Mr. Rose called for everyone to leave except Ms. Kennedy, the other woman and a man.According to the complaint, Mr. Rose began having sex with the other woman, in an “aggressive” way that Ms. Kennedy says in the suit “appeared painful” for the woman. Ms. Kennedy says that she went to another room in the suite, where she could hear the sounds of breaking glass and objects being thrown in Mr. Rose’s room, and that she heard him yelling at the other woman and calling her a “whore.”According to Ms. Kennedy’s suit, Mr. Rose stormed into the room where she was, knocked her down, “grabbed her by the hair and dragged her across the suite back to his bedroom.” Her knees were bleeding from being scraped against the rug, the suit says.In Mr. Rose’s room, the suit says, he threw her facedown on the bed, tied her hands behind her back with pantyhose and sexually assaulted her, forcing anal penetration. The suit says that Mr. Rose never sought Ms. Kennedy’s consent, and that she “did not consent and felt overpowered.”In her suit, Ms. Kennedy says that she has suffered anxiety and depression as a result of the incident with Mr. Rose, and that her career as an actress and model has suffered. Ms. Kennedy catalogs her success as a Penthouse model, mentioning that she was Pet of the Year in 1983 and was on the cover of the magazine four times.Ms. Kennedy has discussed her encounter with Mr. Rose in the past, including an interview on the website of The Daily Mail in 2016, and in a memoir, “No One’s Pet,” published that same year. She also appeared in “Look Away,” a 2021 documentary about sexual abuse of young women in the music industry.In her memoir, Ms. Kennedy also described her encounter with Mr. Rose as a violent one, which left her “crying and bleeding.” But she added in the book: “Weirdly enough, I was okay with this. I had wanted to be with him since the minute I’d first laid eyes on him, and now I was getting him.”When asked about that account, Ann Olivarius, a lawyer for Ms. Kennedy, said in a statement: “Like many victims of sexual assault, it has taken Sheila time to come to terms with her experiences and to be able to talk about it fully and openly.” More

  • 100 Shares119 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros’ Review: A Beautiful Collaboration

    For his 44th documentary, Frederick Wiseman journeys to the French countryside to examine the workings of a family-owned, Michelin-starred restaurant.Frederick Wiseman’s transporting documentary “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros,” centers on a dynasty of French chefs who live and work in a pastoral region in central France named Ouches, some 65 miles west of Lyon. There, amid rolling green hills and under the canopy of a century-old oak, the Troisgros family has a celebrated restaurant whose beginnings date back to 1930. The current paterfamilias, Michel, who’s in his mid-60s, has been cooking his whole life, and while you could say he makes food, it feels more like an expression of love.Making food sounds too pedestrian for the meticulously prepared, strikingly plated dishes that come out of the kitchen at their restaurant, Le Bois Sans Feuilles (The Woods Without Leaves), and certainly this is cooking on a rarefied level. It has long been acclaimed, receiving its first Michelin star in 1956 and holding on to its third since 1968. (It’s gone through several iterations and name changes.) Michel’s father and uncle, Pierre and Jean, were widely considered to be nouvelle cuisine pioneers, emblematized by a famous salmon and sorrel dish they invented. The chef Daniel Boulud includes the Troisgros salmon recipe in several of his cookbooks.“Menus-Plaisirs” is Wiseman’s 44th documentary and the first that he’s made since “City Hall” (2020), which notionally focuses on the administration building for the city of Boston. (In between “City Hall” and “Menus-Plaisirs,” he made one of his rare forays into fiction, “A Couple,” about Sophia Tolstoy.) Wiseman’s great subject is institutions, though more rightly the tension between organizations — with their spaces, norms and rituals — and the people moving through them. The bluntly descriptive titles of his movies are an authorial signature (“Hospital,” “High School,” “Boxing Gym”) and suggestively and purposely generic; one of the profound satisfactions of his work is seeing how he turns the general into the specific.Wiseman directed, edited and served as one of the producers on “Menus-Plaisirs,” which runs a heroic four hours (about a half-hour shorter than “City Hall”!). It’s absorbing from start to finish. Much of it takes place inside the bright, nature-inspired Le Bois Sans Feuilles, which is part of a larger complex set in a mid-19th-century estate that the family restored a few years back and includes a boutique hotel overseen by Michel’s wife, Marie-Pierre. Wiseman also pops into another Troisgros restaurant, Le Central, in the neighboring city of Roanne, making a more leisurely visit to a third, the nearby La Colline du Colombier, which is in the countryside.Wiseman’s approach is analytical and dialectical, and only seemingly straightforward. As is customary with his movies, “Menus-Plaisirs” doesn’t have music, voice-over narration, onscreen descriptive text, chapter titles or any other standard hand-holding. Wiseman instead uses images of specific physical spaces — the movie opens on the Roanne railway station and then cuts to its bustling, sumptuously stocked farmer’s market — that immediately establish a strong sense of place. In other words, he grounds you in the world of the movie and then, face by face, shot by shot, scene by scene, steadily fills in its details.The movie is arranged in distinct sections that suggest the rhythms of running a restaurant. The inaugural segment (call it Prep) introduces Michel and his sons: César, who cooks alongside his father and some dozen others at Le Bois Sans Feuilles, and the younger Léo, the chef for La Colline du Colombier. The sons run into each other at the market, where they’re hunting and pecking among the perfectly arranged leafy greens, bouquets of beets and radishes, and astonishing clusters of oyster mushrooms. In this section, the sons also meet with Michel to discuss menu options, and then the movie shifts to Le Bois Sans Feuilles.It’s there in this restaurant’s spacious, quietly humming open kitchen that the movie begins to gather momentum as Wiseman moves about focusing on one and then another station: One chef expertly filets a large salmon while another trims and butchers some ribs. Elsewhere, Michel and a sommelier discuss some outrageously priced Burgundies, and a brigade of servers ready themselves for the fast-approaching service. “Menus-Plaisirs” has all the virtues of a Wiseman movie, but its focus on beautiful food that’s prepared and served with equal beauty makes it especially seductive, even if you’re not keen on everything on the menu. I now know, for instance, more than I ever cared to about cooking veal brains.Once the customers arrive (call this section Service), the rhythms of the kitchen appreciably accelerate. Anyone who’s ever watched great cooks in action (in life or on TV) knows how enjoyable, even hypnotic it can be watching people with superb craft and technique at work, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Wiseman is sensitive to the sights and sounds of kitchens, including the tempos of chopping knives and the syncopated hiss and burble of pots on a hot stove. He also underscores the hard work on an individual level and when the chefs are in the flow together. These kitchens thrum with quiet intensity, not ego.As “Menus-Plaisirs” continues, its focus widens as the chefs meet with some of their providers — at a small cattle farm, a vineyard, a cheese cave — where the mutual respect is palpable and the talk is sincere and often turns to sustainability. Each of these interludes could be spun off into a separate documentary, but together they expand the prismatic portrait of a family for whom cooking is an aesthetic, a passion, an expression of love, an ethic. There’s individual genius in the Troisgros kitchens, no doubt, but also enormous collaborative effort, which makes the documentary a nice metaphor for filmmaking itself. “Everything is beautiful,” a visibly moved Michel says of his estate; the same holds true of this deeply pleasurable movie.Menus-Plaisirs — Les TroisgrosNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 4 hours. In theaters. More