Appreciations      12/04/2008  

New Le Cirque Movie Captures The Pain and Poignancy of a Family Business

The first 15 minutes or so of the new HBO documentary Le Cirque: A Table in Heaven are pretty much what you would expect. Vintage TV footage of Sirio Maccioni being interviewed by David Susskind, shots of Henry Kissinger hobnobbing at Le Cirque, stock footage of steamships and skyscrapers as Sirio recounts his hungry youth, and so forth. Then something beautiful happens. The film turns into a penetrating character study of a family. Sirio is the most opaque of the figures in the film; he’s lovably crotchety and curmudgeonly, but it’s his sons who emerge most humanly, and whose struggles both as sons and as businessmen end up transcending the original movie. Mauro, the youngest of Sirio’s sons, comes across as almost cosmically put-upon, grinding away in frustration as his father treats him as if he were still a kid, rather than the most worldly and urbane of restaurateurs; his beleaguered expressions, gnawing away at a hamburger or resting his hands on his face during a meeting, would require a Rodin to do justice to. But the most moving figure in the film is Marco, the middle son…

who is charged with trying to convey to Sirio the need to change with the times, to keep the family business viable. The emotional high point of the movie, and maybe of my month, is the scene in which Marco, trying to get across to his father just how dire the situation is, starts to weep, without his voice ever changing or cracking. The thought of Le Cirque being “another crappy restaurant” is so painful and unthinkable to him, and he has so little rancor in him towards his beloved father, that there is nothing else for him to do, no other way to let out the pain.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I was crying too, as I watched it; you forget the emotional commitment it takes to make a great restaurant go, especially one that’s not of the moment, strutting its three-star hour in the sun, and gathering the bot mots of bloggers at an hourly rate. Le Cirque is not the grand dowager it’s made out to be, but it isn’t the latest ingenue either, and to see the pride and pain and effort that went into keeping it good, I’m struck with admiration for the Macchioni men.  You forget sometimes that Le Cirque, rare among elite New York restaurants, is still a family business; but you won’t forget after seeing Le Cirque: A Taste of Heaven. The movie debuts on HBO on December 29th.

Comments

2 Responses to “New Le Cirque Movie Captures The Pain and Poignancy of a Family Business”

  1. Mauro Maccioni Clears Up Page Six’s Le Cirque Misunderstanding : The Feedbag on December 22nd, 2008 2:38 pm

    [...] Related: New Le Cirque Movie Captures The Pain and Poignancy of a Family Business [...]

  2. Le Cirque: A Table in Heaven Airs Tonight on HBO : The Feedbag on December 29th, 2008 10:18 am

    [...] is not the true subject of the documentary, even though so much of its running time concerns him. As we’ve said before, it’s a story of the Maccioni sons and their struggle to help define Le Cirque, to make it [...]

Leave a Reply