Toast is made for TV 90 minute film of the published autobiography of food critic and writer Nigel Slater, and award winning journalist with the Observer Newspaper. At the close of the film he leaves home, goes to London and obtains a job in the kitchen of the Savoy Hotel. Toast is in fact the story of a childhood and adolescence rather than the blow by blow rise of a cook into writer about food. I am not sure if it is the intention of the director but Slater does not fare well in the story. He is brought up in Wolverhampton with an insensitive lump of a father played by Nigel Stott and an insipid and neurotic mother who suffers from severe asthma and who dies when he is only nine years of age. His mother has an aversion to cooking and relies on tins, which she also gets wrong and then relies on making Toast to satisfy the appetite, hence the title of the original autobiography and film. Slater the child is revealed as wanting to change the situation and tries to introduce the family to Spaghetti Bolognaise.
After the death father commences a relationship with the a cleaning lady, more attractive, sexy and a good cook, played by Helena Bonham Carter and whose tour de force is a Lemon Meringue pie which according to Slater his step mother refused to divulge the recipe so he spent years trying to work out her success and when he achieves this his father rejects because it is produced at the wrong time.
What I do not understand from the film and obviously the book may make the situation more clear is why Nigel took against his step mother so badly given that the relationship with his mother was not a great one. The answer could be what I suspect is made more fundamental in the book but skated over in the film, the relationship between food and sex and his development as a homosexual. The film suggests hat during his childhood his birth mother and father had a comfortable but sexually unadventurous relationship while that with the step mother was of a different order and there is the hint of the step mother turning to adolescent 15 year old for comfort when her husband suddenly dies. What the film also fails to mention is that Nigel has two older brothers.
I suspect interest and enjoyment in the film rests on the extent to which the audience comprised those who had read his column, or used his books or become a fan through his TV work. I must confess not to have known anything about him and therefore had none of the usual curiosity about his background which I do have with those whose work I appreciate.
After the death father commences a relationship with the a cleaning lady, more attractive, sexy and a good cook, played by Helena Bonham Carter and whose tour de force is a Lemon Meringue pie which according to Slater his step mother refused to divulge the recipe so he spent years trying to work out her success and when he achieves this his father rejects because it is produced at the wrong time.
What I do not understand from the film and obviously the book may make the situation more clear is why Nigel took against his step mother so badly given that the relationship with his mother was not a great one. The answer could be what I suspect is made more fundamental in the book but skated over in the film, the relationship between food and sex and his development as a homosexual. The film suggests hat during his childhood his birth mother and father had a comfortable but sexually unadventurous relationship while that with the step mother was of a different order and there is the hint of the step mother turning to adolescent 15 year old for comfort when her husband suddenly dies. What the film also fails to mention is that Nigel has two older brothers.
I suspect interest and enjoyment in the film rests on the extent to which the audience comprised those who had read his column, or used his books or become a fan through his TV work. I must confess not to have known anything about him and therefore had none of the usual curiosity about his background which I do have with those whose work I appreciate.
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