The price of sushi: $300 a plate!

As I (and no doubt others) have noted before, a good subject does not make for a good documentary. Case in point = D. Gelb's (?) "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." There are many really cool things you'll see and learn from this 82-minute documentary: It's about an 85-year-old master sushi chef who runs a restaurant with 10 seats at a counter, in a Tokyo subway station, and it's considered the best (and most expensive) sushi restaurant in the world - $300 a plate, reservations months in advance, no menu to choose from, meal of 20 pieces of sushi - and Michelin 3-star rating, the only sushi restaurant in the world at that level I think. How can this be? That's a great question - and to that extent, the film does provide answers: we see how much time and care and attention to detail goes into every element of the prep, from selection of fish at market to time-consuming even tedious preparation (massaging the octupus for 50 minutes, warming each seaweed wrapping individually over a gas flame, special high-pressure technique for cooking the rice, and so on) to exquisite skill at slicing the fish and preparing each item individually by hand, to ridiculously high standards _ Jiro continually tasting fish throughout the day and rejecting many. So that much, plus the long apprenticeships and the complex teamwork, is interesting to see - especially scenes at the fish market. But a good, let alone a great, documentary needs some sort of collision of forces and some kind of narrative arc - in other words, it has to appropriate some of the elements of narrative cinema - and that's where Jiro Dreams comes up short: the filmmakers try really hard to build up a few themes, for example, the tension between father and older son, who's now 50 and still hasn't been able to run his own restaurant; Jiro's sense of abandonment by his own alcoholic father - but the material and tension just is not there, or in any case the filmmakers are unable to elicit much interior strife from the reticent chef and his staff. The result - the film feels long an overly long video promo, and it could probably have been much better as a half-hour TV special. Its methods are kind of old-fashioned, especially when seen against some of the more edgy contemporary documentaries like Sweetgrass, e.g., in that it uses lots of interviews for context, intrusive editing (such as fast-forwards), and a pushy score mostly by Philip Glass (with some Mozart concerto 21, making the cliched point that a meal is like a symphony). The film is definitely worth seeing for those interested in the topic, but as a piece of documentary filmmaking it's limited.