What's cooking? (2000)
Director: Gurinder Chadha
Country: UK, USA
Country: UK, USA
What’s cooking? is a film set in the USA during a Thanksgiving day, and centred on four ethnically different families: African American, Vietnamese, Latino and Jewish. Food is an essential theme of the film, which in fact shows all the preparation of the Thanksgiving lunch and the lunch itself. This film is different from the others, in that the four different families prepare the traditional Thanksgiving dish: roast turkey. In this case, thus, perhaps due to the significance of Thanksgiving in American culture, food is no longer what differentiates cultural identities, but what unites the four families beyond their different ethnic and cultural background.
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It is however controversial to talk about unification, as during the film we face the problems each family is going through, sometimes leading to a definitive rupture, as in the case of Elizabeth Avila and her ex-husband Javier. The meal time is a moment, for each family, to face all the difficulties they are dealing with, uncovering their many secrets. In a sense, thus, food symbolises the sometimes hypocritical external appearance of each family and its members, which try to hide - in particular to other members of the family - the truths that would lead to a disruption in the family. On the other hand, however, we could say that food also represents the ties of each family, which go beyond any problem.