The Bear is the new TV series on Disney Plus that has met with great critical acclaim, because his way of telling the kitchen has positively displaced the public. Let’s see together how over the years the world of professional cooking has been represented on TV and in the cinema.
The Bear, the new TV series from Disney Plus, brings the world of cooking to the small screen and displaces audiences and critics with great success. A rough, dirty TV series, which is classified as a comedy, for its clearly hilarious moments, but which leaves a lot of melancholy and bitterness throughout the course of the episodes. The Bear is a series that uses the world of cooking to actually tell about life, its difficulties and hardships. Here, lies the true success of the series: the kitchen that moves away from a certain aesthetic that we are used to seeing in cinema and TV series and becomes a realistic means of storytelling.
The Bear: a new way of seeing cooking in the world of cinema and TV series
The world of cinema has made us immerse in stories that use food and cuisine to enchant, creating magic between people through culinary creations. Food has always been that extra delicacy ingredient to add to a love story, to a friendship and to create an experience that involves all the senses for the viewer. Chocolat immediately comes to mind, in which Juliette Binoche enchants an entire town under Lent with her chocolate creations, but also the delicate Amore cuisine and Curry in which the kitchen unites two rival families as well as two different cultures.
In these two cases, the director is always Lasse Hallström, who chooses the formula of the fable to focus on the food that unites and reconciles. Here, the food comes from workspaces where calm and concentration reign and where cooking is a mystical moment in which passion is transmitted in every dish.
But we know that the world of cooking is different, we know that these are environments where no margin for error is allowedwhere there is a very precise hierarchy, where the heat of the fires, the small spaces, the pressure of being perfect sometimes crushes, makes the air go missing and makes everything far from fairytale.
The Bear: What imagery does the Disney Plus series come from
This aspect manages to tell it in more recent years, The Taste of Success film with Bradley Cooper flanked by a great cast. Here, the protagonist is obsessed with food, with recipes to be followed down to the smallest detail, with verging on perfection of taste and aesthetics in every dish. And this obsession leads him to be an unbearable despot with all his staff, brigade and dining room, as well as having brought him to the brink of the precipice in the past. His dishes come out of the kitchen that look like works of art and have a perfect harmony in flavor and taste. A harmony that is totally absent in the protagonist and also in his way of conceiving the kitchenthat is, as a means to reach perfection and to redeem oneself from all its past mistakes.
Bradley Cooper himself was the protagonist of an almost unknown serial jewel: Kitchen confidential. This is a 2005 TV series inspired by the book of the same name by chef Anthony Bourdain. An HBO series that after four episodes aired was canceled for low ratings and only thanks to Hulu it was possible to see the remaining nine episodes. A real shame, because in these few episodes, you could touch a hectic kitchen, with rambling and unstable chefs in private life, all thanks to a choice of directing as a documentary with a single room.
These last two titles are fundamental to lead us to The Bear. Here, we find ourselves in a small kitchen, full of chefs who call each other chefs and repeat it continuously and obsessively at the end of each sentence or word they speak. A recovery that is always close to food who are cooking, on the faces, on the actions and almost never gives us an overview: we don’t really know how big the restaurant is and how many seats they have per day or how many reservations they have.
And all this information for the purposes of the series is useless, because The Bear wants to tell a chef who carries in his heart an enormous sadness for the loss of his brother, a repressed anger for how he lost him and for the fact that he bequeathed him. a fast food full of debt. The desire for revenge of the protagonist Carmy is felt, but so too all his pain, which pours into the way of cooking and also of relating to the staff. In this series the dialogues are very close and are phrases that the protagonists pass between them, totally devoid of communicability. In fact, of the last episode, the protagonists are unable to really communicate with each other, but they try through cooking and the love that each of them has towards that place in his own way.
Disney Plus takes us to a new way of conceiving the kitchen
With all these elements, The Bear was a huge hit, acclaimed, considered one of the best series of the year. The reason for this success, besides the fact that it is certainly an excellent serial product, also lies in this new serial way of presenting the world of cooking, which is perhaps what the public wants: the place of the kitchen as a dispensation of hardships, injustices, satisfactions that arrive at times and a realistic story of our lives. Perhaps the public is tired of the bright kitchens, the recipes of smiling chefs, the fable of food that creates magic. Perhaps the public also wants to see the behind the scenes of this fairytale and The Bear serves it hot and on a paper plate.
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