I’ll admit, I was very confused as to what the heck was going on for thirty to forty minutes in Hu Gaun’s The Chef, The Actor And The Scoundrel. Opening with animation and comic book style, multi-frame design, very quickly I realized this wasn’t the type of movie I thought I was getting into. I suppose I was thinking of The Good, The Bad, And The Weird, but Chef is actually based on history, although the script takes some wild extremes that, while never going completely off the wall, do push the envelope as far as realism is concerned.
Actually making sense of Chef does require your attention, especially if you’re reading subtitles which, at times, go by a tad too quickly, although certainly never to the point of ruining the experience. Hu Guan uses a variety of flashbacks and delayed revelations and other direction mechanisms that can make following Chef difficult at times. Ultimately the viewer is rewarded for sticking with it, through the weird scenes and those that maybe feel unnecessary or drawn out. I wasn’t upset, shall we say, when the credits began to roll at the 1h45m marker, although the credits are actually worth watching as well due to their inclusion of behind the scenes footage and bloopers.
Trying to convey the story of Chef is somewhat difficult without giving away some of its secrets, which are what hold the film together. As mentioned earlier, the first half hour or so is a confusing “mess”, but once the plot begins to get revealed, it really starts to tighten up all the antics on screen. Be aware that, if you want to avoid spoilers, you should skip the rest of this paragraph. That said, the gist of the story is that a deadly cholera epidemic has spread in Japan-occupied Beijing in 1941. Traveling by stagecoach, a Japanese military officer and a scientist who are thought to be transporting an antidote or vaccine for the deadly disease is hijacked by an apparent random, well, Scoundrel. The wagon ends up crashing into a restaurant run by the Chef, and the Actor works in this restaurant, too. The trio, along with the Chef’s supposed wife, want to open this mysterious container and discover its contents. The Japanese men refuse to speak and give away anything about who they are, their mission, and what this material is, and thus begins a lengthy, multi-faceted interrogation of the two. Meanwhile, some local detectives trying to locate the two missing Japanese men begin to snoop around, and ultimately the restaurant becomes a focal point for the Japanese army as they try to reclaim their two men and the supposed antidote they were carrying.
The Blu-ray release of Chef comes from Well Go and its image and audio presentation are excellent. As you would rightly expect from a modern film, the transfer to Blu-ray is crisp and without any noticeable flaws. The colorful sets and characters add an extra dimension of appeal to the movie’s visual offering, too. Audio tracks include a Mandarin/Japanese DTS-HD Master 5.1 as well as the same languages in Dolby Digital, and English Subtitles. The subtitles do go by too fast at times, not so much during the dialogue of the movie thankfully, but whenever there is text on screen that is translated, which does happen a few times. This isn’t a critical issue, just a minor gripe.
As for extra features, there is a trailer clocking in at 1m42s, whose image quality was surprisingly rough. A blooper reel running 1m36s in SD is also here, and worth a watch. The 11m19s Making Of is in HD and split into four parts, each one focusing on the four main protagonists. Cast interviews and behind the scenes/production footage is shown, which is always interesting.
With that, let’s get to the summary…
