MUBI presents Let’s Eat! Food and Film: “A true feast for the eyes and the palate”
Is there any pairing more delightful than a good meal alongside a good film? I doubt it, particularly after spending last Thursday inside Selfridges’ cinema, where the streaming platform MUBI presented an all-day pop-up festival titled Let’s Eat! Food and Film. Starting at 2pm and finishing late in the evening, the programme offered a blend of cult cinema, culinary indulgence, and expert discussions, each one illuminating the idea that food on screen is never merely a prop but a narrative force with its own psychological and aesthetic weight.
Promoted as a “celebration of cinema’s most delicious stories”, the festival served up a menu of films united by their devotion to food. Visitors could select from seven titles, among them The Lunchbox (2013), Babette’s Feast (1987) and First Cow (2020). I chose to revisit The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Peter Greenaway’s 1989 crime fantasia that has become a cult classic. Featuring Richard Bohringer, Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren and Alan Howard, the film unfolds almost entirely inside Le Hollandais, a lavish French restaurant controlled by the brutish criminal Albert Spica. Night after night, Spica storms in with his gang of thugs, unaware that his wife is having an affair with a fellow diner. Richard, the cook, enables their clandestine encounters and distracts Albert and his entourage with a grotesque parade of haute cuisine.
Having seen the film before, I was reminded of how visually overbearing it can be. Watching it feels like consuming the most decadent meal, one that overwhelms yet somehow keeps you reaching for the next bite. Excess saturates every frame: the lighting glares; the colours throb. Jean-Paul Gaultier’s costumes, bold and sculptural, shift in colour whenever a character moves from one room to another as if the wardrobe itself is obeying the restaurant’s surreal palette. The effect becomes hypnotic and slightly claustrophobic, a painterly diorama in which bodies appear constantly at risk of being swallowed by the mise-en-scène.
Food appears everywhere in the film, lush one moment and revolting the next. Sensuous displays of dishes and ingredients are repeatedly disrupted by Spica’s eruptions of violence or left to decay, reminders that abundance is always shadowed by rot. The film draws an explicit connection between eating and erotic desire. As Albert remarks, the pleasures of food and sex are bound together because “the naughty bits and the dirty bits are so close”. Desire and sustenance bleed into one another, and everything becomes meat for someone’s table. At times, the film can become a bit overwhelming, but if you’re looking for something boldly different – vulgar, excessive, yet still visually stunning – it is absolutely worth seeing.
Before the screening, guests were offered a spread of drinks and dishes. A Campari bar served complimentary cocktails. Chef and culinary artist Nil Mutluer prepared a menu that felt both luxuriant and quietly precise: radishes with butter, sourdough, and mixed leaves to begin; followed by asparagus and peas arranged on gleaming silver trays and chalices, rotisserie chicken, a mushroom omelette, and a quiche Lorraine. Dessert arrived in the form of a candied-fruit cake accompanied by cranberry and ginger jelly.
The entire event was a true feast for the eyes and the palate. The films were chosen with care to complement the food, and the ambience, decoration, colour scheme, and curated menu all felt deliberate and thoughtfully orchestrated. One leaves wondering, with more than a little anticipation, when the next edition will arrive.
Constance Ayrton
For more information about MUBI presents Let’s Eat! Food and Film, visit their website here.
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