Food Club: Danish dramedy about seniors rediscovering life via Italian cooking has heart despite Hallmark moments

By Karen Gordon

Fresh B-

It’s Christmas in Denmark. And so, it’s a terrible time for solid, serious and grandmotherly Marie, to find out her husband of 44 years, with whom she also works, is having an affair.  

And even more difficult to swallow: he’s very much more concerned with protecting his lover’s feelings than hers. 

It is, perhaps, a clichéd place to start a movie about women over the age of 60.  But Food Club unselfconsciously deploys a series of movie clichés in a gentle, if slightly predictable dramedy, that uses those tropes in service of respecting the joyful humanity of the characters. 

Italian cooking teacher Alessandro finds the way to Marie’s heart in Food Club.

Marie (Kirsten Olesen) is   of course, devastated to simultaneously discover her husband’s infidelity and callous indifference.  It leaves her in a shocked and a kind of emotional limbo. 

It also leaves her in possession of a Christmas gift from her sons, meant for their parents, but now hers alone: a week long cooking course in Puglia, set for the week ahead. Marie calls her two best girlfriends-since-childhood, Berllng (Stina Ekblad)  and Vanja, (Kirsten Lehfeldt) to lunch to update them on her situation,  and offer them the trip. The two friends accept, but insist that the tightly wound and clearly very angry Marie comes with them. 

Food Club isn’t just about a woman on the edge dealing with a marital infidelity. It’s the story of three friends over age 60, contending with life as single women - with all of the wisdom and baggage that implies, now and going forward.

As such each of the three women represents a “type.”  Berling is a sophisticated, fashionable  perennially  single woman, trying not to let age define or limit her, or shut down her sexuality.  Vanja is a widow still holding on to the memory of her husband years after his death and afraid to let that go. And Marie has been so single-mindedly devoted to domesticity and family that she hasn’t noticed that it’s come at the expense of herself, her femininity, sexuality and maybe even worse, her ability to experience anything joyful on her own terms.  

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But then here comes the movie metaphor for an awakening of the senses - a return of one’s dolce vita: Italy. 

The setting is, of course beautiful. The school and their accommodations are in a beautiful agriturismo, or inn.  Alessandro (Michele Venitucci), the host and cooking teacher has a somewhat therapeutic approach to teaching cooking. He encourages his students to taste along the way and experiment with herbs and spices, a more sensual experience than following a recipe by rote. 

In Italy, preparing food and eating with friends and family are central to life, a way of stopping to connect with a bit of pleasure every day.  But in Food Club, the focus isn’t so much on the food itself, but rather on the act of cooking.  

To cook is to stay in the moment and connect with what you’re doing.  In its way, it’s a kind of meditation that can awaken and thrill the senses. In other words, it’s a transformative experience in a padella.

The cooking school has three other guests.  There’s a single man (also Danish) in his late fifties or early sixties, and, a couple in their mid-forties who constantly travel in search of new experiences. Over the course of a week, they are away from the routine and rules of daily life, and in close contact with each other and their fellow students. Each of the women is challenged in places where their particular vulnerabilities lie. Most especially Marie.

She’s so out of touch, and to be fair in shock and grief, that she believes she can and should win back her cheating husband. She’s shut down, abstemious, and full of unacknowledged rage. She doesn’t see what’s going on around her, or outside of her own preoccupations, which of course leads to problems.

Yes, more clichés, used as a shorthand in service of the larger story. 

Neither Food Club writer Anne-Marie Olesen, nor director Barbara Topsøe-Rothenborg seem particularly hung up on trying to avoid the clichés.  They seem to be rather more interested in letting those tropes set the scene, helping keep the tone of movie easygoing, while the characters play out their storylines.

As a result, Food Club is sometimes uneven and even veers into Hallmark movie territory at intervals. Strangely, every time the film came close to turn-off territory, it did something to redeem itself. 

For all that, the movie manages to avoid the worst movie clichés about women of a certain age: Too often older women are used as story fodder, sacrificial lambs to someone else’s happiness, diminished or treated as a bit pathetic. The message is often, “Your time in the sun is done, now leave the stage for someone else.”

Food Club does the opposite. Marie, Berling and Vanja  each have their own disappointments and difficulties, painful circumstances that many older women face. These are themselves clichés, but they’re also truths.  For all of its predictability, one of the best things about Food Club is that it treats the characters with respect.  And credit goes to a cast that does a wonderful job of embodying these characters and giving them nuance. 

With a light touch, Food Club talks about women in this final third of life, as people full of history, complexity and wisdom, and acknowledges that they wish the world wasn’t tossing away their relevance and defining them as sexless grandmothers. It graces its characters with agency, and the notion that no matter how the culture seems to want to erase you, there are new chapters ahead. 

CLICK HERE to view Bonnie Laufer’s video Q&A with Food Club stars Kristen Olesen and Stina Ekblad.

Food Club.  Directed by Barbara Topsøe-Rothenborg. Stars Kristen Olesen, Stina Ekblad  and Kirsten Lehfeldt. Available via VOD/Digital as of March 19.