On June 8, 2018, American star chef Anthony Bourdain, 61, was found hanged in the room he occupied in a hotel in Alsace. There, accompanied by his friend Eric Ripert, the French chef based in New York, he was filming an episode of his culinary show “Parts Unknown”, which he had presented on CNN since 2013.
Bourdain, little known in France, was on the other hand a celebrity in the United States since the publication of Kitchen Confidential (Bloomsbury, 2000), translated into French under the title Cuisine et confidences. Crazy memoirs of a trendy chef (2003, NiL éditions), which recounts the story of his life mixed with controversial and polemical remarks. In Medium Raw (Ecco, 2010, untranslated), he classified his colleagues into “heroes” and “villains”, wildly mocking the media Alain Ducasse and Alice Waters.
A former drug addict – cocaine, heroin, LSD – Bourdain himself had become, through his books and his numerous television shows, a celebrity chef. were published After his tragic death, a biography and a long documentary of almost two hours, Roadrunner. A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021), by Oscar-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville, where his ex-wife and many of his relatives and colleagues testify. With the exception of the actress Asia Argento, his last companion, questioned by the film.
The documentary, which uses a lot of archive footage, underlines Anthony Bourdain’s heavy complacency in allowing himself to be filmed in all narcissistic situations (tattooed bare chest, reconstruction of a psychoanalytic session, practicing ju-jitsu, swallowing the beating heart of a snake, slitting the throat of a chicken or killing a wild pig).
There is almost never any mention of cooking, so we end up forgetting that it was Anthony Bourdain’s job – probably he had forgotten it himself. And, by dint of circling the world – he traveled two hundred and fifty days a year for his shows for the Travel Channel and CNN – Bourdain ended up circling around himself without ever finding his center.
Asia Argento’s Entrance into Anthony Bourdain’s Life in 2016
The last third of the film tells the story of Asia Argento’s arrival in his life in 2016, during a shoot in Rome. A simple guest on the show, she soon became its director when the usual director withdrew and was forced to undergo surgery. Many witnesses spoke of the young Italian’s influence over the American. From then on, Anthony Bourdain created a vacuum around him, fired former collaborators and seemed to lose his footing when photos appeared in an Italian tabloid showing the actress in the arms of the young French journalist Hugo Clément.
The least ethical consideration would have been for the actress to give her point of view, which is not the case. Did she refuse? It turns out rather that the director, as he agreed in interviews with the press, including the one granted to the website Vulture, on July 15, 2021, did not wish to do so, arguing that Asia’s comments Argento, already known, would only have disturbed the chessboard of his story.
Which adds to the discomfort aroused by this overly long, overly complacent film – not in the words of the witnesses, sometimes critical, but in the avalanche of images of the charismatic leader, wandering, like Amfortas, with his original, unhealable wound.
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