Voulez-Vous Coucher Avec Carême?
But have you seen the earring?
Photo: Apple TV+
The genius minds behind shoveling money in the general direction of shiny and mostly television-shaped content at Apple TV+ have hit on a genius premise: What if there was a French chef who had a little earring? Such is the thrust of their latest foray into international programming, a series based on the life of Marie-Antoine Carême, a legendary figure in French culinary history — he is referenced as a gastronomic god in The Taste of Things — who has been transformed into a dashing twink spy. In the first few minutes of Carême, he is introduced feeding a woman whipped cream and then eating her out. Later, he is recruited into early Napoleonic French cabinet scheming. He throws a hissy fit after another chef smashes the gigantic frigate he has crafted out of meringue with a sword. (Why does the chef have a sword in the kitchen? Why don’t you have a sword in your kitchen?) In short, Carême is nearly a parody of what you imagine a French TV show would look like.
But that turns out to be a delightful thing! Carême carries on with Gallic aplomb, unapologetic about making the show’s pastry as important as its politics. The real Carême cooked for the infamous French diplomat Talleyrand, a guy who managed to slither his way through the revolution, the reign of Napoleon, and the reinstatement of the monarchy. The show uses that as a jumping-off point to imagine that Talleyrand (played by a scowling Jérémie Renier, no relation to Hawkeye) recruited the chef (Benjamin Voisin) into helping him deploy various schemes with the promise of reuniting Carême with his adoptive father. The convolutions of the plot get confusing fast — there are other rivals of Talleyrand who try to get Carême on their side instead, as well as various older aristocratic women hitting on him — but what’s important is that early on Carême is asked to seduce Napoleon’s wife, Josephine, so that he can steal information hidden in their marital bedroom. Bien sûr, he succeeds! How could he not? He has a little earring!
That the show can carry off this ridiculous conceit depends on Voisin, who plays the roguish chef and looks like he was plucked at random off the streets of the Marais (he is, in fact, an accomplished actor who was really good in the gay romance Summer of 85). Voisin plays the stakes of every scene he is in with utter seriousness, which is just right for a show that is utterly ridiculous. You have to believe Carême cares as much about arranging his mise en place as he does about the fate of his nation, because the show gives both equal weight. In one sequence, he’s inventing vol-au-vent, a savory (shocking at the time!) pastry the real Carême is credited with inventing (though that is debated, according to the pastry’s contentious Wikipedia page), while also trying to untangle the schemes of the woman he is cooking for — there is a mystery involving a secret room hidden behind a barrel of specific vintage in her wine cellar. In another episode, Carême participates in a national cooking competition, judged by a snarling food critic who has a pet monkey for some reason. We are told the chef who lost the year before committed suicide out of shame.
There’s a limit to how far you can take this kind of show, essentially a soap, until the genre strains under the weight of the absurdity, and as Carême goes along, it reveals how tough it is to stop a soufflé from collapsing. The show tries to balance its chef’s womanizing with a friendly but also inevitably romantic dynamic with his sous-chef, Agathe (Alice Da Luz), and a charged relationship with another woman who has been recruited into spycraft (Lyna Khoudri), but watching him work through a Betty-and-Veronica dynamic is never as interesting as watching him wander around seducing whomever stumbles, voluntarily or not, into his path. Similarly, it’s hard to know what to make of the series’ odd levels of sympathy for France’s deposed royalty; there’s an episode where Carême bonds with an exiled Louis XVIII by cooking him potatoes and making a statement about how they’re enjoyed by all the people of France. You’d think you could rely on the French to not celebrate kings, but Carême, at least a few episodes in, comes across as awfully laissez-faire.
For light fare — an amuse-bouche, essentially — Carême gets the job done. It’s part of a boomlet of French television imported to America (or American television attempting to import a little je ne sais quoi, as in Étoile) and clearly chasing the high of the breakout transatlantic success of Call My Agent. It’s a niche Apple TV+ has been trying to find for a while; it turned out the very pretty but lethargic Succession-esque fashion drama La Maison, as well as the high-drama, high-tanin Franco-Japanese crossover Drops of God and a whole spy thriller with Vincent Cassel and Eva Green called Liaison that I don’t know whether anyone has actually watched. But Carême proves the streamer has figured it out. You don’t necessarily need to feed an audience a full gourmet meal, especially a tedious one. We’ll be happy with whipped cream.
