‘Chef in Love’ Prepares a Leisurely Tale

The European release title of “A Chef in Love,” a Franco-Georgian co-production, was “The Thousand and One Recipes of a Chef in Love,” and that more meandering name is truer to this film’s leisurely, haphazard spirit.

Starring French comedy veteran Pierre Richard (“The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe”), “Chef” is one of those decorous and decorative films from the Continent that are dear to viewers of a certain age. Not surprisingly, “Chef” was nominated for the best foreign language film Oscar, losing to the more accomplished but philosophically similar “Kolya.”

“Chef” starts in Paris, where Georgian Anton Gogoladze (Jean-Yves Gautier) has gone to hang a show of his celebrated fellow countryman, Pirsomani. There he meets a cigar-smoking gastronomic photographer named Marcelle (Micheline Presle), who says she’s the niece of Pascal Ichac and wants to know what that name means to him.

It turns out that Pascal Ichac, author of a renowned cookbook about Georgian cuisine, was a particular hero of Anton’s mother. Even more coincidentally, Marcelle has a manuscript in Georgian that details a personal relationship between Ichac and that very mother. Would the astonished Anton like to read and translate it for her?

With these preliminaries out of the way, “A Chef in Love” spends most of its time in languorous flashbacks to 1920s Georgia. As directed by Nana Djordjadze, “Chef” offers a series of picture-postcard prettified displays of a land apparently filled with colorful local people prone to breaking into spontaneous song and dance at any moment.

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To this fairy tale place comes French gourmand Ichac (Richard), an explorer in search of new tastes. On a train he meets the gorgeous red-headed Princess Cecilia Abachidze (Nino Kirtadze) and, despite the difference in their ages, they are soon so much in love that they’re crushing grapes together. Yes, it’s that kind of a movie.

With a graying beard and hair more unruly than Einstein’s, Richard’s Pascal Ichac is a character we’ve seen before, the unrestrained artist so bursting with joie de vivre that he makes your teeth hurt. Prone to saying poetic things like, “I want to photograph the silence,” Ichac is forever flummoxing the locals with the strength of his life force. “He’s crazy,” people say, and the inevitable rejoinder is, “he’s French.”

In love with Georgia as well as with Cecilia, Ichac opens one of the world’s great restaurants in Tbilisi, where he wouldn’t mind living happily ever after. But after his superb sense of smell saves the life of that country’s president (it’s a long story), the chef gets more involved in local politics than he ever wanted to be.

Given the film’s time frame, politics means the long shadow of the Communist revolution. Soon the crass and slovenly Bolsheviks, whose appreciation of fine food is nil, have overrun Tbilisi. Making things worse, one of their leaders, the dread Zigmund (Teimour Kahmhadze), is infatuated with Cecilia.

Despite its soft heart, “Chef in Love” is inexplicably determined to show the world a different face. The story line of Irakli Kvirikadze’s script increasingly strains for relevance and bittersweet poignancy as the Bolshevik stranglehold tightens, but given what’s come before, it’s difficult to take these ambitions seriously.

Since both Ichac and his modern niece live for food, “A Chef in Love” does not stint on loving pictures of elaborate dishes, though a successor to “Big Night” it’s not. The film’s philosophy is summed up by Ichac when he presciently states, “Bolshevism will disappear; fine cuisine won’t.” And neither, apparently, will old-fashioned films like this.

* MPAA rating: PG-13 for nudity, sexual situations and some images of violence. Times guidelines: deaths poetically rendered.

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‘A Chef in Love’

Pierre Richard: Pascal Ichac

Micheline Presle: Marcelle Ichac

Nino Kirtadze: Cecilia Abachidze

Teimour Kahmhadze: Zigmund Gogoladze

Jean-Yves Gautier: Anton Gogoladze

A Les Films du Rivage, Studios Adam et Eve, La Sept Cinema, Studio Babelsberg, CMC, Sotra, Innova co-production, released by Sony Pictures Classics. Director Nana Djordjadze. Producer Marc Ruscart. Executive producers Teimour Bablouani, Thomas Bauermeister. Screenplay by Irakli Kvirikadze. Cinematographer Guiorgui Beridze. Editors Vessela Martschewski, Guili Grigoriani. Music Goran Bregovic. Production design Vakhtang Rouroua, Teimour Chmaladze. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

* Playing at selected theaters.