Burnt: Movie Analysis

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Michelin stars are the goal, masculinity is what was placed at the stake by the chef in John Wells’ Burnt. The chef, Adam Jones (Bradley Cooper), is a sobered up chef with two Michelin stars that have gone through his own version of redemption for his dark past by shucking one million oysters in New Orleans before boarding on a flight to London to “revamp” a restaurant at The Langham hotel managed by a long friend, Tony (Daniel Bruhl), to aim for his third. On the course to achieve his third star, Jones recruits Helene (Sienna Miller), a brilliant female British cook that becomes the his love interest in the movie. In Burnt, Cooper is reviving his role as a drug-loaded chef from Kitchen Confidential in 2005 -a short lived FOX series based on Anthony …show more content…
The movie starts with Adam Jones in leather jacket and a sunglasses roaming around New Orleans and shucking oysters -a rough work that is commonly done by minimum-wage male workers in the kitchen. This image of masculinity is a contrast to when the audience is introduced to Tony, the flamboyant, classy maitre’d of The Langham with an accent (that definitely does not sound French nor anything European). Tony’s characteristics can be considered as almost feminine and eventually, the audience figured out that Tony is a homosexual. This contrasting attribute in the first 20 minutes of the movie has set a certain hierarchy and roles of the hero and the caretaker in Burnt . Burnt, by its best, is a mockery of masculinity and desire of a chef to strive for excellence. The perception of overly ambitious and offensively aggressive chefs have been constructed since the introduction of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and Marco Pierre White’s The Devil in The Kitchen and, quite obviously, Hell’s Kitchen with the image of Gordon Ramsay who is -not surprisingly, one of the executive producers for