Bear Restaurant： The first bite of doughnut is sweet, and the second bite is sad.
There are two things I don’t like about this new Hulu drama The Bear. First, when the restaurant was in a serious debt crisis, it was like a blessing to the soul. They found huge amounts of cash in tin cans of ketchup. Crisis is like dew, which is immediately evaporated by the warm sun of money. Second, this is another story of a talented white man who has been troubled to save all beings and himself.
"Bear Restaurant" poster
Jeremy Allen White moved from Shameless to a roadside Italian restaurant in Chicago. Lip’s new name is Carmen. Before taking over this crappy restaurant, she worked in the top French restaurant in America. Carmen was listed as the heir to the restaurant after her brother Mike (jon bernthal) shot himself without warning. He wanted to make up for the useless brotherly relationship and save his brother’s last legacy, so he landed in the kitchen of hell from the disciplined paradise.
"Xiong Jia Restaurant" stills
This restaurant with mixed employees is an extension of the street and the foothold of the dead house outside the bedroom. Gangs are clamoring for territory outside. On arcade game Day, colorful dead houses lined up on the street waiting for admission. In any case, Mike’s best friend and restaurant partner Ricky (Ebon Moss-Bakla Herr) has a big trick-firing a gun into the air to curb all kinds of monsters.
Ricky and Mike are "white trash" in the usual sense, dragged down by debt, alcohol, drug addiction, irresponsibility and the habit of overdrawing the future. They are always drunk today, living in the past happiness of Ghostbusters. Ricky likes to say "giant baby" best, and people around him look at him as if he were cursing himself loudly.
Like this year’s high-scoring English drama "This Is Going To Hurt", "Xiongjia Restaurant" is also a variation of modern life, and the volume is huge. Everyone in the kitchen is shouting, and the words overlap. Most of the time, no one can hear each other clearly. When the brakes fail, they can’t stop talking, and the urgency seems to shout that once they stop, their lives will also stagnate.
Drama like this is a kind of noise therapy, fighting poison with poison, and letting the energy of life flow away in the constant impact of shouting and eardrums. It has long gone beyond the scope of venting, not inflating, but letting it leak. Lying on the floor with air leakage can withstand the noise impact of waves.
"Xiong Jia Restaurant" stills
When Carmen first arrived here, the chaos and noise were like a heat wave, which could make people lose their vitality in one second. The clock on the wall keeps moving, hour after hour, day after day. It is found that they have been trapped here for years, facing many crises every day, but they have not died. Inefficient communication and jokes as lubricants make this hard life inertia. Everyone is not only used to noise, but also depends on it.
But they are lonely. Because although I spend every day spitting and cooking oil, my colleagues have become old friends for many years. They still lack real communication and can’t effectively soothe loneliness. In-depth communication needs leisure time. This group of people have been pushed by the clock and have no time to sit down and talk and taste their own food. When this opportunity is rare, everyone is silent. Someone sighed.
"Xiong Jia Restaurant" stills
Like the emergency room, the kitchen takes care of people’s most basic needs. Death and life and filling the stomach are big things. Great events make a loud noise, which makes people suffer in the roaring rhythm and suffer from fatigue bombing.
It has another wonderful effect, and so do the film and television dramas with the same tone. Whether it’s Dr. Adam (Ben Whishaw) in Pain Inevitable or Chef Carmen in Bear’s Restaurant, there are self-escapes. They are people who have a lack of personality and are deeply hurt, so they are doubly attached to their work. What is particularly important is the working atmosphere. Only in the high pressure in the emergency room or kitchen can they temporarily forget their problems and feel a glimmer of life and calm. Give them a quiet environment, but the beast inside will escape from the cage. The only thing that can suppress the inner roar is greater external noise.
There are too many characters like Carmen and Adam in British and American dramas. They are lonely heroes who accidentally broke into the system. They are closed-minded and very bad at team operation. But forced to do so, the genius landed on the earth, but he could not be a superman. He could only open his heart and let the human kindness and his genius hurt each other, nourish each other, grow together, and reach an ideal situation that is difficult to reach in reality.
"Listen to your inner voice and know yourself", which is always told by meditation and yoga that modern people love. But people with peace of mind lack drama conflicts, and people like Carmen and Adam are worth watching. In a conversation like a stray bullet in the battlefield, Carmen and her colleagues repeated "received, received, received" and kept telling each other, "I heard what you said." They tried to listen, but they were unable to do it. I want to reach out and give each other a hand, but it is always difficult to protect myself.
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Pressure is everywhere, not only from the crisis-ridden and time-pressed production links (symbolized by that wall clock). There is also a necessity for modern people-debt. After Mike died, he left Carmen with huge debts. Their cousin (not related by blood) Ricky is a visionary and an old lament. He wants to ignore the debt, but how is it possible? Ricky watched the bars and old shops in this street disappear one by one, replaced by chain stores or even more terrible depression.
Rich is very sensitive to change. He always emphasizes that this street has a "fragile ecosystem". Part of it is nostalgia, and the other part is instinctive resistance to the invasion of traditional communities by big capital. Ricky had better not change anything. But Mike died, and his idle marriage failed. It is not that he wants to keep everything as it is, and the world will not change as he wishes. When Debts and Carmen didn’t land in this restaurant as he wished, the change happened.
Carmen and Sidney (Ayu Edvili), a young new chef of the regular army, brought the process of cooking in the French restaurant. These two chefs who have returned to the streets from the "civilized world" hate the strict hierarchy of chefs in high-end restaurants and appreciate the equal coexistence and human touch among employees here, but they can’t stand the bad process and are suffocated by the mess. The rebound aroused by the reform broke out in the shot of quick editing. In the seventh episode, a mirror of the whole episode captures the team that is on the verge of collapse.
The goals set by Carmen and Sidney are too idealistic. They want to solve a difficult problem that modern enterprise system can’t solve: the optimal development of efficiency and personal ability. We must survive and maintain a steady cash flow to resist the pressure brought by the expansion of large capital.
It may be because the problem is really unsolvable that the screenwriter came up with the plot of hiding gold in the tomato pot, which miraculously restored the blood of this kitchen on the verge of disintegration, so as to develop the next season. This miracle reversed the foregone conclusion of "how to work hard or fail" and brought people a sense of relief.
Otherwise, what else can they do? Friendship makes no money. If the restaurant collapses, everyone will have to go their separate ways. Elsewhere, there is no room to support the perfect donut experiment of former McDonald’s employee Marcus (Lionel Boyce). Tina (Lisa Keren-Zayas), a self-respecting elder sister, is afraid that she can only be bossed around and do odd jobs in another messy kitchen.
What the tomato can saves is more like an old world. People in this world are rougher, foul-mouthed, and far from the fragility and affectation of the middle class. Carmen and Ricky hosted a birthday party, and Ricky’s anti-anxiety medicine (which has a sleeping effect) accidentally ran into the beverage machine, and the children on the lawn fell asleep. The master (Carmen’s uncle) is very happy because a room full of annoying "little angels" can finally be quiet for a while.
It’s like going back to children running all over the mountains. It’s not unusual to be like a cat and a dog. It’s not as expensive as it used to be today. When Ricky mumbles to defend Italian tradition, Carmen always reminds him, "You don’t even have Italian blood". What Ricky wants to defend is actually the vitality of this kind of stubble, and it is all in the close-up of food.
Food determines attitude towards life. In this restaurant, chunks of butter melt slowly. Beef that is tender and tender outside is cut into thin slices with pink marble texture. In the clear olive oil, the spices burst into a crisp sound. Doughnuts are baptized with hot oil, icing and chocolate, attracting passers-by in the window.
"Xiong Jia Restaurant" stills
There is a line that says, "The first bite of a doughnut is sweet, and the second bite is sad." Very incisive, describing the poor who care about their heads and feet. Poor people fill their stomachs with coke, and the intake of carbohydrate and oil always exceeds the standard. The colorful colors of food are mostly due to pigments. They need immediate food to comfort them and have no time to think about tomorrow. They are harvested one after another like wheat, but who says that their life is not worth making into a wonderful play, although it is old-fashioned?
The first season did have a warm and best-of-both-worlds ending, to comfort our hearts that were extremely tired from the noise bombing, because we were worried that the past life was no longer and the future was in jeopardy. Runaway donut maniacs Marcus and Sidney have both returned to the team. The restaurant has temporarily stepped out of the predicament and hung up the signboard that it is closed for business and is about to return brilliantly. I hope there will be another season.
[Specially published by Shanghai Literature and Art Review Special Fund]