Grand Maison Paris recently premiered at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. It is the continuation of 2019’s Grand Maison Tokyo, a Japanese television show. It’s an odd thing when a television show makes the jump to the cinema world. The TV series followed Kimura Takuya (an axiom of J-Drama) on his quest to create a 3 Michelin Star restaurant in Tokyo. Each episode found him solving some sort of problem that stood before this goal (sometimes the issues were interpersonal, such as one of his chef’s desire to quit and spend more time with his daughter, and other times they were professional, such as trying to woo suppliers who were unwilling to work with the restaurant). No matter what, as each episode resolved, a song specially created for the TV show, Tatsuro Yamashita’s “Recipe,” would play. Paradoxically, when this song played, Grand Maison Tokyo became cinema.
Grand Maison Paris follows most of the characters from the TV series, now transported to Paris, as they help Takuya’s character become the 1st Asian chef to get 3 Michelin stars in France. The atmosphere is rather different, however. The film (helmed by TV pro Ayuko Tsukahara, responsible for some of the direction on the series, and also on a modern masterpiece covered in an earlier TV diary column, Why I Dress Up For Love) trades the slightly heightened and stylized world of the TV version for a much more mundane vision. There’s an attempt at verisimilitude that feels at odds with the rather formulaic world at hand – it’s surprising that so much of the film actually features the characters communicating in French. It makes sense, yes, but it is almost a way of saying that things are serious now. We’re making cinema here. Paradoxically, because Tatsuro Yamashita’s “Recipe” never plays, the film never becomes cinema.
Does this make sense? The TV image is clean, it is bright, it is sometimes imperfect in a charming way (the Japanese TV directors love to shoot against bright windows and don’t do much to protect against it!). In Grand Maison Paris, there is much more care to the image, much more time to balance it, to tamp it down and present it in a realistic register. But immediately I revolt against this vision. It goes against the spirit of the enterprise – it should be cheaper, less prestigious, less in good taste. I’m reminded of Kimi wa Pet and its often strange decoupage, which was made up of often-masterful framing and staging, and also a series of bizarre and funky setups.
Let’s be more concrete. The central dilemma of the film (will Takuya’s chef get the 3 Michelin stars?) is almost beside the point. Much more interesting is the way that it depicts the insular nature of French society, where this Japanese-run French restaurant finds it very hard to source ingredients because they’re all hijacked by the natives. The restaurant’s staff is then a microcosm of an ideal French society that reinvents French cuisine by bringing in techniques from their own cultures – true excellence is only achieved when the characters dare to challenge the status quo.
Late in the film, a character says that “cooking has no borders.” I wonder if cinema has a border. Is there a line that an image crosses that renders it televisual versus cinematic? And what makes an image one and not the other? I am being a bit polemical when I say that Grand Maison Paris is not cinema (my definition is very broad, if we’re honest), but it is symptomatic of an approach which is very antithetical to what interests me. The original Grand Maison Tokyo is a prestige production, it’s a Kimura Takuya drama after all. But it is also beholden to certain episodic formulas which keep things on track, which allows the execution to be a matter of staging. Because there is a border, Kimura Takuya is able to deliver a performance that relies on his screen persona, easily understood, prickly and aloof, but also morally upright, never in doubt. Conversely in Grand Maison Paris, it feels as if we have to create everything from scratch, as if there are no guard rails, and thus Takuya’s character quickly becomes unlikable, unmoored. The relationships from the TV show are taken for granted – Mitsuhiro Oikawa’s character never once wears Psycho Bunny; Ikki Sawamura’s importance is never quite felt; and would you know that Ai Tominaga’s food influencer (wasn’t she a Marie Claire writer?) was Kimura Takuya’s lover based on this film? All is forgotten in order to make room for Korean actor and 2PM member Ok Taec-yeon, whose character’s debt problems add at least 20 minutes of unnecessary drama.
If we are jettisoning the pleasures of television, abandoning its qualities in search of the nebulous world of cinema, then we must more thoroughly question what we are getting in its place. And the truth is that we are not getting much at all. I wrote earlier this year that Kimura Takuya in his television productions is the material. But in here he recedes to the background, becomes part of the film world in a way that makes sense, but goes against the spirit of why we watch him in the first place. It’s true that Takuya is not the type of actor to assert himself if the part doesn’t call for it, but it’s a shame to ask him to do so little. And to neuter his chemistry with Kyoka Suzuki, arguably the heart of the original series, seems a complete miscalculation.
The space for invention, for imagination. Perhaps that’s what is the true battleground. The schema of the TV series is able to somehow protect this space – a scene is allowed to reach its limit, a performance is grounded and becomes charming, a camera movement highlights a gesture, the music swells, the viewer smiles, there is magic… In Grand Maison Paris, you can imagine during the filming the effort exerted in trying to make scenes work, butting heads against the restrictions of a production which is handling foreign location work, actors speaking in French, Korean, English, trying to make sure the harsh light coming through the windows is stylized, tamed, standardized. All these things are piled one on top of each other, stifling creativity, weighing down the actors, saddling them with issues which distract from the work. There is no space, there is an obligation. And because of this there’s no music, no smiles, no magic. It is a production without energy. All of this to say that perhaps the script of Grand Maison Paris never justified the filming to begin with. And if you couldn’t get another Tatsuro Yamashita song, then was it really worth flying to Paris to film something that has no chance?
This column is called What is the Modern Cinema and it’s named this way because we believe that a healthy cinephilia is one that constantly asks this question, searches for answers, doesn’t settle into a comfortable nostalgia… A film like Grand Maison Paris is emblematic of the nature of the contemporary Japanese film production, at least in its most commercial form. It is an extension of an existing property, made with a certain level of craft and professionalism, but yet lacking a distinct authorial intervention that would really push it an interesting direction. Without this, why even go into the world of cinema at all? Because, paradoxically, a TV show is more enjoyable if it remains a show, and allows itself to become cinema through its thorough exploitation of its TV form; and a film is less enjoyable the more it tries to become cinematic, applying stylistic tics to material in order to differentiate itself from the mere televisual. What does a Grand Maison Paris teach us? Television thrives because it has borders a priori, which it sometimes allows itself to cross. And cinema is a world that must create its own borders, define them for the viewer, as it develops. Both come with major responsibilities, but it is much easier, I will submit, to get lost in that ill-defined terrain of cinema. Looking at both Grand Maison Tokyo and Grand Maison Paris side-by-side, I think of the wonderful scenes in the former where we enter the kitchen, we see the struggle of creation, the back-and-forth between Takuya and Suzuki’s characters. They are given the space and time to create something between them, and the viewer feels it. It’s a matter of priorities, I suppose. When the Michelin star announcements are presented at film’s end, the decision to not play “Recipe” is proof that we are in a much different world, with much different rules. And I know which world I prefer.
Lucky Star 
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