(courtesy IMDb)
It takes a deft hand to make a sparkling comedy also hum meaningfully with emotional substance but director Joaquín Mazón, working to a story he co-penned with Olatz Arroyo which as written by Joaquín Oristrellm manages it near flawlessly in Too Many Chefs (La Vida Padre).
The film may be a barrel of laughs, some outright slapstick, some verbally balletic but at its core, it is about a son, star Bilbao chef Mikel (Enric Auquer), who has a luxurious life in an AI-assisted house and a restaurant eagerly and almost certainly to be successful, in its pursuit of a third Michelin star, trying to connect with his long-lost father Juan (Karra Elejalde) who suddenly reappears in town after a three-decade absence.
The cause of Juan’s disappearance is a prank that Mikel played one night in 1990 when he was a boy and he and his older brother Ander (Lander Otaola) were bored and trying to amuse themselves during a particularly important dinner service which spectacularly backfired, leaving his father’s burgeoning career in tatters, the family rent apart and Mikel saddled with decades of guilt.
If that all sounds weighty, it is and it’s meant to be because what powers smoothly successful Mikel with his Audi, his fashionable clothes and his celebrity chef status is the gnawing sense he failed his father and must somehow atone by bringing his restaurant Ataria back and restoring to it the status and renown his father was once achingly close to attaining.
That’s a lot of regret to power a career and it works well, at least in sending Mikel on an ever-upward trajectory to culinary fame and success but he has no wife or girlfriend, he lives alone and while brother Ander has a partner and a just-arrived kid, Mikel has physically close but emotionally at-a-distance links to his family and no real sense of a life away from his cooking.
Then one day, at the hospital to see Ander’s kid, with the whole family in tow, he sees a man who can only be his father who, having been brought in for psychiatric assessment following an incident in town, is being held pending review by a resident doctor, Nagore (Megan Montaner) who, rather handily, Mikel clashes with all but guaranteeing that Too Many Chefs will also have a frothily fun rom-com beating at its comedically thoughtful heart.
That’s quite a few narrative elements all competing for attention, much as Mikel simultaneously tries garner that elusive third Michelin star while trying to look after his dad – who, by the way, has a condition that locks him mentally and emotionally in the year of his trauma, 1990, meaning he refuses to see Mikel as his grown son which generates all kinds of laughs in and of itself – and stay close to Nagore who, it turns out, wants to do a study on Juan and his unusual situation.
Somehow though it all works, and works a treat, meaning that far from being a narrative roller derby with elements flying everywhere, all of them trying to suck all the storyline oxygen out of the room,Too Many Chefs is a frothily fun delight with a warm heart and some sage lessons on carrying guilt around way past its expiry date.
The comedy is what you, of course, notice first and foremost right throughout the film.
Juan’s arrival in Mikel’s artfully manicured, carefully controlled life is unbridled chaos, all leaping out ambulance onto windscreens, suspicious police and cell time, and the hilarious machinations of a man who may retain his cooking skills (including for a particular recipe Mikel is rather selfishly trying to extract from him; yes, guilt-ridden he may be but initially the son helps the father to burnish his career) but who simply can’t conceive of a world where his sons are grown up and his wife Rosa (Maribel Salas) is married to a “schmuck”.
What makes the comedy feel not even remotely cringe-inducing – after all, using the mentally ill to drive humour is fraught – is that at all times Juan’s humanity is respected, and while he may do funny things, he himself is not the object of ridicule, a feat of humanity-driven comedy made possible that the origin of Juan’s trauma is told, simply, affectingly and as emotionally straight it comes.
We therefore encounter the slapstick hilarity of Juan’s barrelling re-entry into his lonely son’s life not as some cruelly exploitive joke but as the result of a tragic incident decades before which lends the admittedly funny shenanigans some real emotional weight which doesn’t sink the confected comic delights of the story but rather elevates them to something affectingly laughable.
It’s a tricky balancing act but Mazón manages it with aplomb, investing in one the weight of the world but also the ability to acerbically and hilariously poke fun at a reality they simply refuse to embrace, at least at first.
Somehow in the midst of what turns out to be one big therapy session for almost everyone involved, where history looks like it might just repeat itself, love blossoms, reconnections are remade and life’s gaping emotional hole is sealed up with a reconciliation that very few get but which Too Many Chefs uses to compellingly moving, very funny effect.
They say that all good comedy, and the people who deliver it, are driven by pain and that’s on full display in the heartfelt, whimsically weighty delights of Too Many Chefs which understands that grief and loss and trauma linger and that we never really get over it but that also, when the chance arrive for it to heal, no matter delayed, that we are capable of that too, and that, who knows, we may even have some soul-cleansing, life-healing laughs along the way.