Here it is, finally arriving on Netflix, the Anthony Bourdain documentary that sparked controversy last year when director Morgan Neville revealed he’d used AI to bring the chef’s voice back to life – three poignant lines from an email he’d sent to an artist friend. “My life is sort of shit now. You are successful, and I am successful, and I’m wondering: are you happy?” Bourdain took his own life at the age of 61 in 2018. In the end, the AI deepfake gimmick is perhaps the most interesting thing about what is otherwise a conveyor-belt film with plenty of talking heads, some more fawning than others. (Rule of the thumb: the more famous the interviewee, the fewer the insights.)
Bourdain had been “a mediocre chef in a middling restaurant” – his words – when his memoir Kitchen Confidential shot up the book charts. At the time, food was the new rock’n’roll, and Bourdain was like a cross between Iggy Pop and William Burroughs – a bad-boy former drug addict with a dry, laconic wit. At 43, he had thought all his adventures were behind him. Instead, Bourdain landed a TV show – A Cook’s Tour, later Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations – which took him around the world. The film-makers have done a terrific job here trawling through episodes, stitching together footage to create a portrait of a man who went out in the world with open eyes, hungry for encounters and meaning.
