The affectation and awkwardness of the dinner party has never been particularly appealing – and, if you already share those feelings, An Exquisite Meal (2020) is really not the film to change your mind. It’s a surreal, deliberately alienating glimpse at an especially abortive evening in. If your tastes can tolerate this particular kind of unravelling, narrative-lite filmmaking, then there may be just enough narrative to go around but, if you value coherence, this is another dinner party to avoid.
The opening credits, whilst stylish, give little sense of what is to follow (blending 60s-reminiscent animation with grainy, black and white shots of pots and pans). Well, it’s clear a meal is about to take place at least; we skip into colour and the present day, and we have the first of our dinner guests about to step into a very particular kind of suburban home where evidence of global travel is very much front and centre and there to be discussed. Our guests are the stereotypical unhappy couple Beth (Victoria Nugent) and Mark (Ross Magyar), who can’t even agree on the wine they’ve brought. Their hosts are intrepid voyageurs Irene (Amrita Dhaliwal) and chef for the night, Dave (Mike Jimerson).
A few competitive conversations later, Paul, a friend of a friend arrives…then the friend Paul gained access by claiming to know arrives, and finally, some French stranger arrives, but he seems appropriately highbrow to get a place at the table anyway. The stage is therefore set for some sort of disaster to unfold – no one makes films about nights which run smoothly – but it takes some time to determine what precise form this disaster will take.
The truth is, there is no precise form. If the film does anything consistently at all, it’s to pour scorn on the kind of moneyed middle classes who forever talk about what they’re doing, but get around to doing very little. An Exquisite Meal is certainly observant in key respects, even if its targets and topics are so recognisable as to be unsurprising: people boasting about holidays, showboating about exclusive cooking ingredients, talking about yoga retreats or considering IVF purely as a ‘non violent conception option’…well, okay, that last one was a little more out there, but the others are familiar enough, a safe array of irritating genteel pursuits.
The film is very dialogue-heavy and most of its running time consists of these kinds of chats; it’s yet a little too practiced to be funny, for all that, particularly given some of the issues which dog the performances. Some of the actors here are so overblown as to be approaching caricature, whilst some others mumble their way through: it’s as if they’re in different films to one another. The personal disconnect between Dave and Irene may be deliberate, but it feels like their very different ways of speaking their lines are more accidental. And there’s more. There’s loud, persistent incidental music which doesn’t seem particularly meaningful, or fitting. The film – barely an hour long – is divided into chapters, which as ever is a completely meaningless, trendy conceit bringing nothing to the table (yeah, sorry).
Perhaps more importantly though, An Exquisite Meal is difficult to place in terms of a genre; it’s not quite a drama, not really a comedy, certainly not a horror, and not much of anything else except a kind of dinner party version of Waiting For Godot, with all of the Absurdist fixations on purposelessness and deliberate oddness. That is ambitious, in its way, and certainly ambitious for a microbudget film, but a little like the characters in the film, the ambition is compromised. Proceed with care, and only if your tolerance runs to this kind of episodic, non-conventional cinema.
An Exquisite Meal (2020) is available On Demand and Digital from December 28th 2021.