Stills from "The Restaurant's Runaway Night". The image comes from the Internet
Friday night, synonymous with beauty for many, is a busy week that finally has breathing room for the upcoming weekend holidays, so book a decent restaurant for dinner, spend time with lovers, friends, or simply treat your own toil, which may be the imagination of "Friday Night".
However, this is not too romantic for another group of people, and that group of people is the restaurant industry. From chefs, waiters to waiters, employees in all positions of the restaurant face challenges, behind the leisurely and beautiful dining space, deep into the core of the restaurant operation, how much chaos is happening?
Workplace life, kitchen politics
The British film Boiling Point takes viewers from the decent outfield to the inside of the kitchen, depicting how a five-star restaurant in London experiences nuclear-bomb-like conflict and chaos on an ordinary Friday night. Chef Andy, starring Stephen Graham, from the phone call at the beginning of the film, can make the audience feel his tension and the problems he is facing, and it is difficult to balance between family and work, making him like a candle burning at both ends, and neither side can be taken care of.
Unfortunate things are always a disaster, before the opening of the store, the health inspector suddenly came to visit, which suddenly made the various problems of the restaurant emerge one by one, and directly reduced the restaurant evaluation from five stars to three stars. As far as the eye can see, there are also mustards within the staff - the second chef who has the ability but can't wait for a raise is full of resentment, the dishwasher who is often late and fishes in the water has long been very dissatisfied, the new French staff who does not understand the tone of the chef's Liverpool, and the field manager who only wants to overtake the guests but knows nothing about governance - just listening to this character profile is quite interesting.
Workplace life, kitchen politics, things involving people are always the most difficult to solve, but the relationship between people has also become the point where this movie can focus and play - this time compromise, the next time will be doubled, this negligence, next time may lead to a big mistake.
Just before the opening of the store, there is already drama everywhere, not to mention the response with customers after the opening of the business, the film first laid the foreshadowing through the character personality, echoing the interaction and internal contradictions with various guests after the opening of the store. This table is a kicking hall for annoying old competitors and food critics, and the table is an Instagram influencer who wants to get privileges, even a racist and deliberately difficult Austrian, and there is no shortage of guests who are allergic to specific ingredients, with employee-centric, guest-supplemented narrative techniques, between table after table of dialogue, tightly grasping the audience's attention.
Stills from "The Restaurant's Runaway Night". The image comes from the Internet
The whole film has no editing point "one shot to the end"
The most amazing feature of this film is that it adopts a "one-shot" (one-shot) shooting method, but compared with "1917" or "Birdman", although it also focuses on one shot to the end, in fact, there are cutting points that the audience is unaware of, and the virtual and real are staggered to deceive the human eye, creating a "pseudo one shot to the end" effect. However, the ninety-odd minute-long "Restaurant Runaway Night" is really a shot to the end, and the whole film has no editing points. The one-shot technique is usually in order to enhance coherence and fluency, the shooting is very difficult, on the one hand, it tests the director's control and scheduling ability, and it is also a great challenge to the tacit understanding and endurance of the actor's acting skills.
Nevertheless, a shot in the end is not all a benefit, it is easy to make the plot out of focus for a coherent shot, or cause the shortcomings of excessive dialogue, which is also the most important function of editing, but "Restaurant Runaway Night" rarely has this problem, it cleverly uses a one-shot shooting method, the lens that changes all the time to the main characters, creating an unprecedented sense of presence, but also enhancing the realism of the experience, as if the audience also spent the compact ninety minutes together, too into the play, not knowing that time has passed silently.
Set in a single location (a London restaurant), the film creates tension through dialogue between employees and interactions between employees and guests, reminiscent of the 2016 Italian film Perfetti sconosciuti, which also takes place in a small space (home).
Once the scene is minimal, the complexity and charm of the characters will be particularly important, and the suspenseful and engaging script of "Perfect Stranger" has made it popular for remakes in more than 20 countries such as France, South Korea, Germany, and Japan, making it the most remade film in film history. For me, "Restaurant Runaway Night" has the same potential, maybe one day I can see a version of a Korean canteen or a French tavern, embedded in the national conditions and characteristics of different countries, showing that if there is a good script and characters portrayed in place, the film can also attract the audience without luxurious scenes or special effects.
Stills from "The Restaurant's Runaway Night". The image comes from the Internet
Set in a single location (a London restaurant), the film creates tension through dialogue between employees and interactions between employees and guests, reminiscent of the 2016 Italian film Perfetti sconosciuti, which also takes place in a small space (home). The picture shows the stills of "Perfect Stranger". Figure/taken from IMDb
This film comes from the director and screenwriter Philip Barantini's 2019 short film of the same name, co-written with screenwriter James Cummings, and because the plot description is too real, I once wondered if the director sat in the restaurant every day, observing human interactions to draw inspiration - the original director Philip had worked part-time in restaurants for more than a decade, whether it was a Michelin restaurant or a local café, and rose from the bottom to the chef. No life path is in vain, and those experiences in the restaurant became the inspiration for his film directing. Interestingly, the film was filmed at a restaurant in Dalston, East London called Jones & Sons, which was also the restaurant where the director had worked.
The test in one shot is not only the ability to write the script, but also whether all the actors can cooperate with each other, such as a group dance, each clever and accurate action linkage, behind which are meticulous choreography skills and countless repeated rehearsals. The actors of this film spent a total of three weeks rehearsal, originally planned to shoot eight times in four days, but due to the diagnosis of the crew, it was only filmed four times in the end, and finally the third version was adopted, which is not the least wrong version, but the version in which the male protagonist believes that he has the best emotional performance. In addition, because such scripts are difficult to list in detail, Bullet Points are often used to help actors remember the plot direction, so it is like a real person communication, full of uncertainty and organicity, and there are also many improvisational sections that are not mentioned in the script.
Stills from "The Restaurant's Runaway Night". The image comes from the Internet
The pains and pleasures of British working life
Having worked briefly in London, I am quite familiar with the accents of different parts of the UK in the workplace, and I can always get fresh pleasure from colleagues from different backgrounds, because it is not in the restaurant industry, and the work pressure is definitely not as great as depicted in the film, but many of the friends who work in British restaurants around me have seen this movie. The pressure of the restaurant's outfield and the infield is very different, poor communication coupled with the difficulty of waiting for guests, it will indeed be like hell's kitchen, and the viewing experience given by this film is extremely real, the audience is like being in the restaurant, as if they can smell the smell of food, and can also hear the noise of guests chatting on Friday nights.
"Restaurant Runaway Night" is not only a restaurant reality show, he also pays attention to mental health through the character group portrait, such as the chef in the face of the imbalance between family and work, turning to drugs and alcohol, but it makes everything more out of control, the original text of this film is "boiling point", it is the character's suppressed emotions until the end, he also reached the boiling point to collapse. Everyone has their own problems with each other, and it is inevitable that they will be reprimanded, but it is even more important to be the same. It's a surprise that comes with a thorough understanding and experience of the work site, and it definitely resonates with many people.