Simply Irresistible – Bitch Flicks

Gender and Food Week: Eclairried Away: Is it Love or Sugar Shock in ‘Simply Irresistible’?

Tom Bartlett (Sean Patrick Flanery) and Amanda Shelton (Sarah Michelle Gellar) in Simply Irresistible

Guest post written by Carleen Tibbetts.

The 1999 romantic comedy Simply Irresistible begins with the female lead, Amanda Shelton (Sarah Michelle Gellar), milling around a New York City farmer’s market (decked out in Todd Oldham! So 90’s!) searching for ingredients for what she believes is the last service at her restaurant, Southern Cross. A mysterious shaman in the guise of a market vendor convinces Amanda to buy a basket of crabs (totally legit), one of which scampers away and leads her to painfully handsome department store executive Tom Bartlett (Sean Patrick Flanery). Tom is in charge of a new restaurant venture opening in Henri Bendel’s. Flustered, smitten, and clearly playing into the “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach” cliché, as Tom is leaving, Amanda tells him she can cook Crab Napoleon. If this is starting to sound improbable, here’s the trailer:

However, we quickly learn that Amanda’s a bit of a culinary flop. She’s struggling to hold onto her late mother’s restaurant whose only patrons are an elderly married couple and a man who brings his own sack lunch every day. Amanda’s wrestling with her own professional and personal inadequacies: she’s losing the family restaurant, she will never be the caliber of cook her mother was, she’s failed as a daughter, she’s failed herself, etc. At least she’s failing wearing Todd Oldham, right? Is that where the restaurant’s rent checks have been going?

After breaking the news of the restaurant’s last service to her loyal regulars, Amanda goes outside for a cry. As fate would have it, a taxi (driven by this mysterious spirit guide from the farmer’s market…) pulls up in front of the restaurant and out tumbles Tom Bartlett and his high-class girlfriend (Amanda Peet). Fate has literally dropped Tom on Amanda’s doorstep and given her the chance to prove herself as a cook and girlfriend material. Or whatever. Amanda begins to panic, realizing that she has no idea what goes into the Crab Napoleon Tom orders. Her sioux chef cooks all the crabs with the exception of special, all-knowing crab that led Amanda to Tom earlier. This crab hears Amanda’s pleas for success, and things start to turn around. Right . . .

While making the Crab Napoleon, Amanda wishes for everything to come together so that one bite is ecstasy. She asks her chef if he’s noticed all the words there are to describe something delicious: savory, tasty, scrumptious, delectable, mouthwatering (all of which are also used to describe a woman’s attractiveness) and then after she’s done listing these, the Crab Napoleon, done to perfection, suddenly materializes on the plate (No kitchen cleanup required! Thanks, magic crab for making me talented! There’s no way I had the self-esteem to pull this off solo!). Amanda refers to this woman as “the mistake” Tom is with, but the male chef comments that the woman is perfect, with skin “like butter” (the lines between culinary and sexual ecstasy get quite blurred throughout this film), and Amanda is convinced this Barbie-esque woman isn’t right for Tom.

Let’s backtrack a minute. Tom’s no saint. He takes his Barbie to lunch for date number four, the date on which he routinely dumps every woman he dates (after the third date, which suggests they’ve slept together). Also, very classy to dump someone over a meal in a public place where he assumes she won’t cause a scene, right? Pre-lunch, Tom tells his assistant, Lois (Patricia Clarkson) how everything seems to turn sour after the third date. Women start to get clingy and expect things. His flavor-of-the-week wants more, and it makes him uneasy. He even drafts a “happiness chart” demonstrating how things taper off and fizzle after the conjugal third date (how much time does a restaurant exec for a high-end department store have on his hands?). Lois turns the curse of the fourth date around on Tom and asks him what role his behavior plays as the relationship fizzles. Tom has commitment issues. Big surprise. But, back to lunch . . .

Simply Irresistible

Upon eating Amanda’s Crab Napoleon, Tom blisses out. He completely forgets about breaking up with his Barbie. Instead, the Barbie tells Tom she’s too perfect for him, and proceeds to trash Amanda’s restaurant. Amanda needs new plates, and Tom is single again. Amanda dresses up and heads uptown to Henri Bendel to pick out new place settings with a box of éclairs in hand, because she believes “dessert is the whole point of the meal.” Tom eats one of the éclairs, feeding bites of it to Amanda, and what ensues is some hallucinatory, mutually orgasmic sexual fantasy in which he shows her the space for the store’s new restaurant and they dance. Or, they think they danced . . .

Amanda’s cooking has gone from abysmal to five-star. She’s thinking positively about her chosen profession. The restaurant is thriving. The place is hopping. She’s a success. She’s a genius. She’s a successful businesswoman. She done her momma proud. She’s a sister doing it for herself. BUT WAIT, SHE’S SINGLE AND THUS INCOMPLETE!

Amanda falls into that mind game abyss and tries to decode Tom’s behavior, fretting over why he hasn’t called since their sugary rendezvous. She call and invites to cook him dinner after she’s closed up shop for the night. He comes up with some lamely vague “I’m busy” excuse but wants to come by later. As in LATER. Clearly a booty call. Don’t be a doormat, Amanda! He shows up with flowers, and she cooks him dessert using the vanilla orchid he brings her. In what must be the most ridiculous scene, even in a film remotely dealing with the supernatural, some otherworldly fog boils out of the dessert cauldron and envelops them. He licks her skin, tells her she tastes good, and they disappear under what looks like dry ice covering the entire restaurant.

At this point, Tom is craving Amanda, or is it her food he’s after? He has some sort of post-coital glow after eating her baked goods. He begins to panic, wonders what has come over him, and when next he sees her, they float as they’re making out. The dizzying love-rush feelings freak Tom out, he feels trapped, pinned (literally, to the ceiling) and accuses Amanda of witchcraft. Confronted with commitment and serious feelings, Tom bails.

Simply Irresistible

Meanwhile, the French chef decides to walk out before the restaurant at Henri Bendel opens. At the request of his boss, Jonathan (the ever-creepy Dylan Baker), Tom grudgingly asks Amanda to fill in. Jonathan and Lois have also fallen into lust together after Lois literally shoved Amanda’s treats down his throat, and Jonathan wants this venture to be a success.

Amanda manages to shove aside all her neuroses and hang-ups about her talent, or lack thereof, and commandeers a successful multi-course meal as Henri Bendel’s lead chef. Amanda’s emotions are fused into her cooking, and all the patrons travel her peaks and valleys with each course that is served. Tom refrains from eating her food, both out of nervousness for the restaurant’s success, and to test whether or not his feelings for Amanda stemmed from her food.

Tom realizes he’s an emotional infant. How does he win her back? With diamonds and a dress, duh! He leaves a tiara and a pink dress on a Bendel mannequin with a “wear me” note. They dance, for real this time, in the restaurant where Amanda is now chef supreme. She got the notoriety. She tamed a renowned lady-killer. She got the man. She got the fairytale ending. What will become of Southern Cross? Of Amanda and Tom? Of the mystical crab? Who knows, we’re all to busy riding the sugar high to care about anything beyond the ephemeral.

Simply Irresistible

Simply Irresistible both perpetuates and slays gender stereotypes surrounding food, cooking, sex, and their interconnectedness. Sure, Amanda becomes a capable, self-assured cook capable of holding her own in a traditionally male-dominated profession, but was it because she was truly talented or because Tom got her the gig? Why is food (especially baking) almost always used as an aphrodisiac when a woman “seduces” a man and not vice-versa? Why does Lois deliberately set out to entrap Jonathan with Amanda’s desserts? Would he have been interested in her at all otherwise? Would Amanda have had the strength to stay clear of Tom after his man-child temper tantrum?

So much importance is still placed on whether or not a woman can cook, and no matter how enlightened we think we are, a woman who isn’t successful at the whole domestic bit isn’t as desired. Look at all the ads that deal with cooking and cleaning. The vast majority of TV and print ads are still targeted toward women! In 2012! Granted, this is not the Cold-War-Have-a-Martini-in-Hand-For-Your-Husband-When-He-Gets-Home-From-Work-Era, but mothers who work are still expected to shop, cook, and clean up after it all. We can’t all be Nigella Lawsons, but we shouldn’t have to be beautiful baked goods goddesses to be “complete.” As women, we need to follow our passions and creativity and not get caught up in the notion that emotional fulfillment and validation come from whether or not we’re single. Amanda should have thrown that tiara in Tom’s face, handed him a box of her desserts, and told him to get bent.

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Carleen Tibbetts lives in San Francisco. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Word Riot, , and other publications.

Gender & Food Week: ‘Simply Irresistible’

Guest post written by Janyce Denise Glasper.

Simply Irresistible was one forgotten film of the late 90’s. It’s bewitching story failed to spark box office or critical praise thanks to a weak script dropping many unexplained plot points — who the heck was Gene O’ Reily, why did Amanda buy expensive crabs from him, and what was up with the freaking animated crab?

And those were just the introduction problems. However, let’s forget about all that for a moment and talk about food romance.

At the film’s beginning, handed down the reins and lacking the expertise that her deceased mother had to make the restaurant Southern Cross thrive, Amanda Shelton (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is a terrible chef (or in her words “shitty”) and because of that, the financially troubled restaurant will be closing.

Enter Harry Bendel’s savvy businessman Tom Bartlett (Sean Patrick Flanery). Earlier introduced to Amanda by the strange Gene O’Reily who also moonlights as a taxi cab driver, Tom and his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, Chris (Amanda Peet) are unceremoniously dropped off at the Southern Cross.

Tom Bartlett (Sean Patrick Flanery) and Amanda Shelton (Sarah Michelle Gellar) in Simply Irresistible

When he comes into the restaurant with the crisply dressed, superior quality female, suddenly jealous Amanda’s cooking skills come out to play. With the snap of a whip, she has the ability of a kitchen ninja making a fantastic crab napoleon and chicken paillard for the couple on her first try.

To the sounds of jazz and upbeat pop, soon after Tom’s visit and success at crafting a pleasant meal, Amanda looks very happy, bursting out deliciously appealing cuisine that have nothing to do with southern comfort. That “old black magic” is supposedly the reason for Amanda’s glory as the newly hopping restaurant has boasting customers shuffling in and out, possibly by word of mouth, claiming that she makes exceptional food.

Amanda thinks otherwise.

Tom, the commitment phobic rich man, is much too practical and considers dating a business deal, often relating the two together in a creepily obsessive manner. He takes an immediate shining to Amanda, complimenting that crab napoleon, but the magic starts to wear off fast.

Amanda (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Tom (Sean Patrick Flanery) in Simply Irresistible

For as Amanda and Tom discover each other in a magical way — imaginary dancing on a striped ballroom floor high on caramel éclairs, sharing kisses on a vanilla fogged ground, and unpeeling oranges that cause floating up to ceilings — she is stuck on him, he is bothered by it, dumps her, and she doesn’t take the “breakup” too well. In other words, she feels that he is responsible for her sudden rise to culinary fame. “I don’t know if I need you to keep that feeling,” she says wretchedly, desperate to keep him around.

The worst way to upset the female audience is to imply that a woman needed a man. Unless Judith Roberts is the new masculine name, I didn’t understand why the screenwriter had Amanda clinging to Tom in an almost sickening manner. She isn’t given an opportunity to truly relish in her food joy because she is constantly thinking about Tom. Yes, the viewers are aware that before Tom she lacked kitchen talent, but wouldn’t it have been far more amusing if Amanda’s bad cooking was just a mental barrier from her realizing her potential stemmed from trying to live up her mother’s expectations? Why else was her mother mentioned much, but not fully illustrated?

But no. Tom is the reason Amanda can cook.

That is what we and the two of them are supposed to get. If Tom left, Amanda’s passion would dwindle away and the Southern Cross would be back up on the reality market. Sadly enough, Amanda doesn’t have any female friends or a motherly figure to socialize with. Often she asks her sous chef, Nolan (Larry Gilliard Jr.) for advice, especially when it came to her relationship with Tom and that became a problem. Nolan didn’t even believe in her talents after the first meal, jokingly stating that she should stick with making sugar cookies.

Amanda (Sarah Michelle Gellar) in Simply Irresistible

Oh, it was a beautiful sentiment that whatever feelings Amanda possessed came right into her food and emerged into other people — to the “simple” chicken paillard that had Chris acting like a crazy dish breaking diva to the sexually charged caramel éclairs that had everyone at Bendel’s acting on suppressed sensual impulses. However, towards the ending when she receives the offer of a lifetime cooking up a storm for the influential and the rich, she brings more emotional turmoil to the menu that gets to be a quite bizarre.

Would anyone want someone drowning out their tears into their food? Highly doubt that. It wouldn’t be considered sanitary.

As far as performances go, Gellar had a few gem worthy moments, but lacked a certain charismatic chemistry with Flanery, but the witty Patricia Clarkson presented a real scene treat that kept this film from being complete fluffy fodder.

Lois (Patricia Clarkson) in Simply Irresistible

Her supporting character, Lois, a feisty woman pining lustily after Bendel heir Jonathan (Dylan Baker), stole the show and Tom’s box of Amanda’s famous éclairs that he himself had snatched away from an old lady. In this hilarious scene, she relishes her thievery. “Gotta learn to share Tom,” she chirps, devouring the stolen dessert and moaning her pleasure while Tom is left to lick caramel residue from the empty box.

If Clarkson had more scenes with Gellar, Lois would have certainly been a beneficial female companion to naïve Amanda. It seems like the most important element of the film is that Tom’s confidante be a woman and that Amanda’s advisor be a male.

Though Simply Irresistible leaves on a clichéd note and more silly goofiness — like are we supposed to believe that a girl could have her makeup and hair done after hours? — it still serves up a dish of possibilities. Certainly not the best of the romantic genre nor the worst, this film’s minute charm and cheesiness is the stuff greasy pizza is made of.

Well, if women consumed pizza with their chick flick watching that is.

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Janyce Denise Glasper is a writer/artist running two silly blogs of creative adventures called Sugarygingersnap and AfroVeganChick. She enjoys good female centric film, cute rubber duckies, chocolate covered everything (except bugs!), Days of Our Lives, and slaying nightly demons Buffy style in Dayton, Ohio.

Gender & Food Week: A Woman’s Place in the Kitchen: The Cinematic Tradition of Cooking to Catch a Man

Meryl Streep and Steve Martin in It’s Complicated

This guest post is written by Jessica Freeman-Slade.

Early in the 1954 film Sabrina — the original, starring Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart — the titular ingenue finds herself at a cooking school in Paris. Sent over as a gift from her father’s employer, the wealthy Larabee family, Sabrina continues to nurse her crush on the younger Larabee son, David (William Holden), even from Paris, and it shows in her cooking. The head chef inspects her souffle, and declares it “Much too low.” “I don’t know what happened,” she moans pitifully to herself. “I know what happened,” her colleague, a much older French gentleman, says, “You forgot to turn on the oven.” She cries out, and he guesses that she is in love—unhappily in love. “A woman happily in love, she burns the souffle. A woman unhappily in love, she forgets to turn on the oven.”

Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina

As centuries of unequal domestic duties have shown us, women who are happy in the kitchen must, by extension, be happy in love. Having fallen in love with the 1995 version of Sabrina long before seeing the original, I had assumed that Sabrina’s (Julia Ormond) maturity and allure upon returning from Paris were indebted to a haircut, long walks by the Seine, and a new passion for photography — not a new talent at whipping up souffles in perfect capris and ballet flats. The ascription of her romantic desirability to her talent with food is an uncomfortable, backward narrative, one that’s hard to escape from even in modern cinema.Young women have heard throughout time that “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” and film and television have done an excellent job of backing up this assumption. Not all women who can cook were taught to do so at the behest of future matchmakers, but the prevailing attitude, taught to us in women’s magazines and through the constant refrain of mainstream narratives, is that if you catch a man, you’d better make a decent meal. The loathsome popularity of dishes such as “engagement chicken” carry with them the promise that women need only master the kitchen to hook a man. DIY domesticity, maybe, or just cooking to couple up, but either way, it’s an uncomfortably old-fashioned message.

Cooking has always been a creative act, no matter who’s doing the dishes — it requires careful thought, imagination, and precision. It is, in short, one of the most skilled professions that anyone can take on, and also one of the most generous professions, because it requires thinking deeply about another person’s needs and desires. However, when a woman cooks for a man, and in doing so wins his heart, the woman appears conventionally domestic and feminine — traditional in her skill sets, understanding of her appropriate role in the house and in the relationship, and so subservient to the man’s needs. When a woman cooks on film, even when she cooks something extraordinary, there’s something profoundly submissive when she does it to please a man.

Ruth Younger (Ruby Dee) and Walter (Sidney Poitier) in A Raisin in the Sun

In the very beginning of the 1961 film A Raisin in the Sun, Ruth Younger (Ruby Dee) is trying to stir her husband Walter (Sidney Poitier) to start his day — he wants to talk about his dreams, his ambition, and she keeps reminding him to eat his breakfast. He lambasts her for her intolerance, but her means of affecting change — and her means of keeping the family together — have been limited to the kitchen.

Like Water for Chocolate

But cooking for a man, as shown on film, isn’t without its rewards — for good food is one of the best (and cheapest) means of seduction. When someone takes you into their kitchen, hands you a glass of wine, and promises you a delicious meal, it’s a method of flirtation that’s hard to resist. The pairing of womanly passion and culinary skills has been present as long as women’s emotions were captured in fiction: because a woman’s place has been primarily in the kitchen, her expression of whatever feelings or agency she may have comes by way of what she cooks. Look at the way Tita expresses her passion in Like Water for Chocolate, her emotions dripping into the food and infusing each bite with lust, sorrow, and joy. Her desires, forbidden by her family, cannot help but find their way into her cooking.(When this is later adapted into the romantic comedy Simply Irresistible, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s restaurant chef is accused of being a witch, manipulating her love object with the delicious meals she prepares. Just as women would be kept out of the boardroom for fear of their emotions, so too is she kept from running her own kitchen.)

This impulse, to cook to incite pleasure and admiration, even surfaces in more modern films when women would be seemingly more self-sufficient. As recently as 2011’s It’s Complicated, Meryl Streep’s pastry chef gets to be the object of two men’s lusts, in part, in no small part because she’s a spectacular cook. The scene of her late-night date with a new love interest (Steve Martin), where she makes him chocolate croissants from scratch, shows her at her most ebullient (and sexiest) throughout the film. And it’s only a few scenes later that her ex-husband (Alec Baldwin) tells his kids that their mother is the “best cook in the world.” Her talent equals her desirability, displayed in her gift to create a warm, indulgent space for the men in her life.

These scenes aren’t so disquieting on their own—after all, who wouldn’t want to be served a meal infused with lust, or have Meryl Streep bake you croissants at 2am? But the inverted message also comes that, when a woman lacks warmth or compassion, it shows in her cooking.

In Clueless, as Cher (Alicia Silverstone) prepares for a date, her voiceover tells us that “When a boy is coming over, you should always have something baking.” The punchline is then seeing her unwrap an entire roll of frozen cookie dough and dropping it onto a baking sheet. (No surprise later that the entire roll burns to a crisp. “Aw, honey, you baked,” her date condescends. “I tried,” she whimpers.)

The heroine in Mostly Martha, the spectacular 2001 German film, is a good cook, the head chef of a great restaurant, but her cooking doesn’t translate when she has to take care of her niece, Lina. It takes a more genial Italian sous-chef (and Martha’s future love interest) to get the child to eat, and instead of a sophisticated dish, it’s a simple plate of spaghetti that does the trick.

Where Martha’s ambition is rewarded in the restaurant world, it’s punished when she has to act as a surrogate mother (and potential girlfriend). Only once she’s later softened in the film does her cooking — and her parenting — relax to the point of acceptance. But in reality, women don’t just cook for themselves — most of the time, the act of cooking is done as an expression of survival, rather than seduction. Preparing a meal is one indication that a person is fully self-sufficient. It’s a biased opinion, I know, but I raise an eyebrow at anyone, male or female, who tells me that they don’t ever cook for themselves. While making boeuf bourguignon or baking a seven-layer cake takes a greater level of culinary ambition, preparing a series of simple, satisfying dishes show the difference between someone who can take care of themselves, and someone who requires a babysitter.

Amelie (Audrey Tautou) in Amelie

The brief scene in Amelie of the heroine preparing her dinner shows us what adulthood looks like — even when adulthood also comes with skipping stones and playing pranks on the local butcher. And no model proves more inspiring than Janette deSautel, the female chef from HBO’s Treme, whose narrative about her New Orleans’s restaurant is entirely without romantic motivation. Even when her restaurant crumbles due to the post-Katrina economy, she rebuilds her reputation in the hard-scrabble New York restaurant scene. By bringing her New Orleans roots to bear in standout dishes at David Chang’s fictionalized restaurant Lucky Peach, she reestablishes herself as a chef to watch — and finds a new avenue toward her culinary career back in her hometown.

Chef Janette deSautel (Kim Dickens) in Treme

Julie Powell (Amy Adams) and Eric Powell (Chris Messina) in Julie & Julia

And finally, there is Julie & Julia, the story of a modern-day woman (Julie Powell, played by Amy Adams) finding inspiration in Julie Child (Meryl Streep, yet again), and using cooking to dig herself out of her personal and professional ennui. Cooking in this story threatens to tear Julie’s marriage apart — not for her lack of skill, but her preoccupation with what the cooking might mean. Her husband (Chris Messina) doesn’t mind being fed, but he does mind her obsession with letting her cooking skill transform her life. When redemption comes, you know it’s arrived when her husband gives in, asking with a smile “What’s for dinner?” Food becomes a means of personal empowerment, rather than seduction…even if it’s ultimately the husband being fed. And, at least in Julie & Julia, it puts the husband in the role of the sous chef, the kitchen support system, even when the cook is melting down over her lack of trussing ability.

So we’re getting a lot of mixed messages here — can a woman ever cook on film without it looking old-fashioned? Will preparing a meal ever been completely self-satisfying, for the benefit of the chef rather than the diner? Or, like an apron, will the function of cooking on film be forever tied to an expression of gender norms and traditional divisions of domestic labor? I don’t know if we can ever really have much of a distance from Sabrina’s souffle, for depictions of cooking will almost always be expressions of generosity, love, and compassion, no matter who holds the whisk. But for now, I’m hoping for more characters like Janette and Julie, cooking for their own satisfaction and survival rather than someone else’s. That, at least, is a dish that can be served any time of the year.

Jessica Freeman-Slade is a cookbook editor at Random House, and has written reviews for The Rumpus, The Millions, The TK Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Specter Magazine, among others. She lives in Morningside Heights, NY.