An almost literal metaphor for capitalism which, like that false discourse drawn by Jacques Lacan back in the 1970s, believes itself to have no limit, no stopping point. Or as Marx predicted long before: "everything solid will dissolve into thin air". "Nothing is impossible" is his motto. Thus, the subjects, emulating this same logic, voluntarily submit themselves to a machinery that, at a slow fire, is sweeping away each and every one of them.

The chosen setting, a luxury restaurant owned by a renowned chef, is an ideal setting to show the excellences of contemporary capitalism. Exorbitantly priced dishes where diners pay, not for the food - which is what matters least - but for the sublime dream of belonging to the privileged few who have access to the best. Their clientele pay for the exclusivity of the palate of the gods. I thought that what the gastronomic glamour of the Michelin stars has swept away is, precisely, classical gastronomy, the one that referred to the singular delicacies cooked in each region of the planet. Globalisation - a consequence of market liberalisation - has inexorably diluted everything, and with it also the culinary knowledge of our ancestors. 

Unlike traditional gastronomy, which, by the way, was always anonymous, since it consisted of the secret recipes of grandmothers, fishermen or peasants in every corner of the world, haute cuisine always revolves around a name of its own. As if the dishes, the food or their combination had emerged out of nowhere from the ingenuity of a chef. Prestige is consumed there, what is secretly desired. That's why what happens in places like this has little to do with food or eating. One scene shows how a fresh, whole turbot is thrown away because of a forgotten label.

So this poor man-turned-chef, shackled to his glittering career, is nothing more than a slave to his name, a name continually threatened by human error, supervisors, critics, journalists, rivals, ex-partners... anyone can be plotting his failure. But what Andy is unable to see is that failure is precisely what is consummated at the pinnacle of success. The camera, then, points at the father, because he also has a son. On his frenetic night, an ordinary night, his son calls him to remind him that he has won an award for his studies that he, his father, has not attended. A food critic who visits the restaurant that night with a former business partner - because in capitalism there are no friends - also refers to the abandonment of his daughters because she has to be there. Or the resolute head waitress, an expert in social networks and in proving the customer right, in a moment of crisis, locks herself in the bathroom to call her father, who doesn't answer either.

The film, shot in a single sequence shot, extols its architecture, showing that the machinery of capitalism is a continuum with no stopping point. In the physical spaces, interior-exterior merge. The chef is as soon plating as sitting at a customer's table. The personal and working lives of the protagonists are also diluted: the waiter who supplements his salary as a DJ, the kitchen assistant who at the same time as he throws out the rubbish, buys heroin, heroin that he catches contracting a debt that seems unpayable.

Addiction is the model for the functioning of capitalism, and not only because of the exorbitant consumption of drugs and alcohol it provides, but also because of the addiction to work, to success, to fame. The whole army of alienated, lonely and lost people function as one big family. If something fails one night, the failure belongs to everyone. The unpayable and exponential debt, as in the world economy itself, is the sham that supports the whole set-up. Everyone is in debt, they consume more than they earn, natural resources are depleted, but the party goes on.

The outcome is therefore more than predictable. A customer who reports a food allergy will end up swallowing her poison, because sooner or later the human failing will manifest itself. So, one night, all the brilliant successes harvested by a life sacrificed to the universal farce, a human failure, without malice, announces the collapse, the absolute ruin. The cyclist goes on, beats his Guinness record and, at the finish line, bursts. Thus our chef, our pathetic and absurd hero, reaches his boiling point. The stopping point is never that of capitalism but that of the subjects who, emulating the gods, have forgotten their own limitations, their mortality. The alchemical result of the operation of boiling is, at its peak, the disappearance of the subject by evaporation without remainder.

Irene Domínguez

https://colochosblog.wordpress.com/2022/01/04/boiling-point-de-philip-barantini/