Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Toscana' on Netflix, a Drama About a Bitter Chef and the Rustic Italian Experience That Changes Him
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Loading... - Jorge Escamilla
- 08 Jun 2022
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Theo (Anders Matthesen) is the type of fancy-restaurant chef who painstakingly arranges meticulously sliced beets in artful patterns on a plate, drizzles them with some sauce, charges a not insubstantial pile of dough for it and then everyone goes home hungry. Which is to say, he’s famous, his restaurants earn Michelin stars and he tends to yell at people, especially while micromanaging his underlings. This particular restaurant isn’t his dream, however – that’s still in the works. A potential investor in said dream walks into the kitchen and even though he’s a slickster and a little overbearing and zealous, he doesn’t deserve the tongue-lashing he gets from Theo, who’s got a lot of work to do from here on out earning our sympathy as our protagonist.
There are reasons Theo is an Angry Man. He’s long-estranged from his father, who taught him how to cook but then left him and his mother and apparently never looked back. And now he’s dead, and Theo has inherited a villa-castle-restaurant-hotel-grove-ish type property in rustic Tuscany. His plan: zip down there, sell the place, take the money back to Denmark and finally open his own place. But this is TUSCANY, which we all know is a beautiful old-world place, and surely he’ll be instantly converted into an appreciator of such beauty, right? Well, he walks onto the grounds anonymously, sits down, orders some food, gets all exacting about how his bottled water should be poured, turns his nose up at the food and endears himself to exactly no one.
He especially upsets Sophia (Cristiana Dell’Anna), who apparently saw Theo’s father as her own father figure, and now runs the place like someone who loves it, not like a businessperson. Objectively, it’s a bit ramshackle and it could be managed better, but it has oodles of charm, including, but not limited to, the wild pigs in the nearby forest, which staffers hunt and kill and roast over a fire to great succulence. Theo barely gives a crap, though, and still courts a buyer, with the help of Pino (Andrea Bosca), Sophia’s fiancee. This is all happening without Sophia’s support, not that she can do anything about it; it’s her home, and here’s this cold, mean prick flying in and trying to commodify it.
Theo can’t sleep one night so he goes down to the kitchen and scrubs it clean just so he can slice some bread and press the pieces on the grill and get out the mortar and pestle and grind some herbs and fastidiously assemble the world’s most fussed-over… sandwich. God help the man who wakes up at 2 a.m. and can’t settle for some ham on Wonder bread, for if he ate something from a common grocery store he’d surely become a miserable wad of processed fat and sodium rather than be the miserable wad of whatever he is right now. Maybe it’ll take a couple of Vespa rides through the countryside with lovely Sophia to change his bitter character? Read More...
