Alan in Belfast: Tony – a queasy insight into Anthony Bourdain’s entry into chefdom cooking a soufflé of lies (Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 14 August)

A new film from Matt Johnson, Tony, charts how 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain spent the summer of 1975. Telling his parents and anyone else who asks that he has won a writing fellowship, the clumsy, lying, penniless, disrespectful fantasist travels to the Provincetown, Massachusetts summer resort in pursuit of Nancy, an out-of-his-league girl in the year above him at college.

What follows is a very troubling coming of age tale.

A continuing act of grace – or gullibility – by a Brazilian fish restaurant owner (played by a magnificent Antonio Banderas) lifts young Tony (Dominic Sess, The Holdovers) out off immediate destitution. The big chef takes Tony under his wing and makes him wash dishes in the busy diner. But it places Tony – nicknamed ‘flaco’ (skinny) – in a kitchen of misfits, including drugged-up sex pest Sal (Leo Woodall). As the summer progresses, the newest recruit cooks up a soufflé of lies that threaten to come crashing down.

All the while, Tony chases after Nancy (Emilia Jones) who is portrayed as superficially clean cut with the hint of an edgy undertone. “I want you to take my photo because I like the way you look at me” is just one of a number of lines of dialogue which feel like they could have been directly lifted from Bourdain’s early memoir.

All of this leads up to a climatic evening of fleeting honesty when the heat gets too much in the kitchen, and Tony faces up to the people who have given him a second chance.

In real life, Anthony Bourdain went on to become a famous chef with a significant TV career in the US. He died by suicide in 2018, aged 61.

The feeling that some parts of this posthumous biopic might be true left me feeling like I’d eaten a bad oyster. It’s deeply troubling in terms of Tony’s actions and those around him in the kitchen. (Spoiler alert: while some elements have been rearranged to better suit the flow of the film – the scene with the bride is really the head chef and not Sal – much of it is based on his public recollections of his first summer of two in Provincetown.)

Ultimately, one lad’s lack of self-esteem and unfamiliarity with the truth causes injury – physical, financial and emotional – to so many people, that it feels almost unethical to celebrate or commemorate his entry onto the path to becoming a talented chef. Yet the romanticisation is still enormously watchable.

Tony is being screened at Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 14 August. Avoid eating oysters beforehand! (It’s also this week’s Baby Picture screening on Friday morning!)