On June 8, 2018, American star chef Anthony Bourdain, 61, was found hanged in the room he occupied in a hotel in Alsace. He was filming there, accompanied by his friend Eric Ripert, the French chef based in New York, an episode of his cooking 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 editions), which took up the story of his life mixed with controversial and polemical remarks. In Medium Raw (Ecco, 2010, untranslated), he classified his colleagues as “heroes” and “villains”, savagely mocking the media Alain Ducasse and Alice Waters.
A former drug addict – cocaine, heroin, LSD – Bourdain had himself become, through his books and numerous television shows, a celebrity chef. After his tragic death, a biography and a long documentary of almost two hours, Roadrunner, appeared. A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021), by Oscar-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville, in which his ex-wife and many of his relatives and colleagues testify. With the exception of actress Asia Argento, his last companion, questioned by the film.
The documentary, which uses a lot of archival footage, underlines Bourdain’s heavy complacency in letting himself be filmed in all narcissistic situations (tattooed shirtless, reenactment of a psychoanalytic session, practicing ju-jitsu, swallowing the beating heart of a snake, slaughtering a chicken or killing a wild pig).
Cooking is almost never mentioned, so you end up forgetting that it was Anthony Bourdain’s job – he probably forgot it himself. And, by dint of circling around 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.
Owned by Asia Argento
The last third of the film recounts the arrival of Asia Argento in his life, in 2016, during a shoot in Rome. Simple guest of the program, she soon becomes its director thanks to the withdrawal of the usual director, forced to have surgery. Many of the witnesses speak of an influence of the young Italian on the American. From then on, 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 of the ethical considerations would have been for the actress to give her point of view, which is not the case. Did she refuse? It turns out that the director, as he agreed in press interviews, including the one granted to the Vulture website 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 unease aroused by this film, which is too long, too complacent – not in the words of the witnesses, who are sometimes critical, but in the avalanche of images of the charismatic leader, wandering, like Amfortas, with his incurable original wound.