French film ‘Haute Cuisine,’ about Mitterrand’s private cook, opens Friday

The French film “Haute Cuisine” opens at the Nuart in West Los Angeles on Friday, a must-see for anyone who loves France and French cuisine.

Directed by Christian Vincent, who also wrote the script, it’s based on the experience of Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch, a formidable farmhouse cook from Périgord who was French President François Mitterrand’s private cook during the late ’80s in the Elysée Palace. The original title, “Les Saveurs du Palais,” plays on the fact that palais in French means both palace and palate.

The film opens with the Delpeuch character (called Hortense Laborie and played by the marvelous Catherine Frot) cooking at a base camp in Antarctica. The men at the camp call her “President,” because she used to cook for the president of France but doesn’t want to talk about it.

Cut to a black car speeding through the French countryside to La Borderie, Delpeuch’s farm in southwest France (once a bed and breakfast where I met Delpeuch years ago). The car has come to pick up the cook and whisk her to the train to Paris. All she knows is that a high-ranking official needs a cook.

In Paris, the official who meets her train announces that they’re going straight to No. 55. “You don’t know what that is?” he asks. “It’s the Elysée Palace!”

“When I was working there, it was a beautiful experience,” Delpeuch told me during a phone interview. “Oh, yes! I was very happy in this kitchen. I was like on a cloud. The person in front of me was the president and we get on quite well in terms of food.

“The president was a gastronome. Everybody knew that. He was eager to have things in season and the best I could find.”

In the film, when the newly installed private cook goes to him and says she needs to understand what sort of food she should be cooking, he tells her, “Make me a cuisine simple. I detest complicated concoctions.”

And with those words he sets up the tension in the film between traditional women’s or “grandmother’s” cooking and the elaborate haute cuisine of the palace’s all-male banquet kitchen. Indignant that Mitterrand seems to prefer Delpeuch/Laborie’s cooking over his, the head chef refuses to help her in any way. In actual fact, said Delpeuch, “there were difficult moments, but not that kind.”

Actress Frot “took a lot from me,” says Delpeuch. “My own children said they couldn’t believe she was more me than I am!” There is so much that Frot gets exactly right. I loved that she really looked like a country woman, her plain cloth coat always the same, her hair swept up in a no-nonsense manner.”

And when she cooks, she goes into a kind of reverie, reciting the recipe to herself as she performs each step. That’s pure Delpeuch. She loves reading old cookbooks and there’s one wonderful scene in the film when the president tells her about his favorite cookbook, “Eloges de la Cuisine Française” (1933) by Edouard Nignon.

I wept when I saw some of the food in the film — the whole Savoy cabbage stuffed with salmon, the Bresse chicken in a pan, the tarte aux fruits rouges with pistachio nougatine. And when the cook started ordering things directly from the countryside, I cried again at the reverence with which she greeted the mushrooms straight from the forest, the truffles dug up the day before, the ducks and their fattened livers.

And then came the clincher, when the president, now reluctantly on a strict diet for his health, sneaks down to the kitchen one night and has an illicit snack with his cook — tartine (toast) slathered in black truffle butter with slices of Périgord truffle on top. Oh, and enjoyed with a glass of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Jean d’Ormesson, the actor who plays the elderly president, got to eat that tartine three times!

In the film it’s implied that Delpeuch went to Antarctica directly after her stint at the palace. It was really 10 years later. She was casting about for something new to do and happened to see an ad online for a well-paying job as a cook at a scientific base camp in Antarctica. When she called about it, she was told they wouldn’t consider a woman and certainly not someone over 50. (At the time, she was 60 and is now in her mid-70s.) “Well, I thought that it was too much and I was going to apply anyway. And I went. Voilà!”

The Weinstein Co. bought the film at Cannes in 2012. “Haute Cuisine” opens in Los Angeles at the Nuart on Friday.

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Twitter: @sirenevirbila