Short Order
With Emma de Caunes, Rade Sherbedgia, Jack Dee.
Ireland/France, 2005, 35mm, color, 100 min.
Short Order opens with a flamboyant song and dance number—aping Hollywood’s Technicolor musicals of the 40s and 50s—then sharply shifts gears to focus on the darkly comic antics of an oddball group of chefs, waiters, food critics and delivery people whose lives and loves are intertwined in the business of food. Playing out over one long night in an unidentified restaurant, the film centers on short order cook Fifi (de Caunes) – whose culinary skills are such that her food can cause orgasms! Fifi, however, is in a rut and needs to escape her humdrum life. Short Order is a wonderfully colorful, funny and sexy confection, exuberantly directed by Anthony Byrne and acted with considerable charm by an eclectic cast that includes Vanessa Redgrave and John Hurt.