Dir. Frederick Wiseman, US, 2023, 240 mins, in French with English subtitles

Review by Colin Dibben

The Troisgros family – Michel, Marie-Pierre and their sons Cesar and Leo run three restaurants in France’s Loire region, including the 3-Michelin starred Le Bois sans feuilles.

Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros explores the world that has developed around their family and its work. The camera records and curates a series of encounters and events as menus and meals are prepared and produce is selected. It is all done without interviews, narration or music. It is also utterly engrossing, buzzing with visual and audio information and polyphonic with its voices: family members, posh restaurant punters, kitchen and waiting staff, wine suppliers, cheesemakers, farmers and market stallholders.

And, of course, there is drama in the selection of sequences that Wiseman has chosen from, I assume, hundreds of hours of filmed material.

The film is informative and gripping, but also makes you wonder how the ‘embedded’ camera works – although this is perhaps less of a question in such convivial and luxurious surroundings. I’d think that people would be more or less happy to engage with filming here, whereas in some of Wiseman’s more confrontational work, set in public institutions, you wonder what their buy-in is.

But, then, in both types of his films, people are largely ‘performing’ in an attempt to secure a positive outcome for themselves. The people we meet here do not bitch or moan or reveal quasi-secrets or hidden trauma. The camera does not get access to the private worlds of the people we meet. They are all performative types engaged in a public performance, the performance that necessarily happens when two people engage with each other in a setting with a camera present. Perhaps also without the presence of the camera.

For me, this is all a bit of a revelation: why bother telling stories such as writing film scripts with all their fakery when there is strong, inherent drama in two or more people having a real-world conversation? Perhaps all you need is the drama inherent in people engaging in and with each other and ‘institutions’, in the widest sense of the word.

Luckily for me, then, the BFI is bringing out a Blu-ray box set of five of Wiseman’s classic films on 26 January, as well as 8 further films on the BFI Player.

This is unmissable stuff. I thought it would be a bit of a slog but the film is gripping for every second of its runtime.

Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros is out on selected cinemas on 2 January 2026