The Flea Pit Presents — Double Bill No. 001
Two films about truffles. Neither really about truffles.
A Note from the Projection Room
Deep in the forests of Oregon, a reclusive former chef searches for his stolen pig. Half a world away, in the woodlands of northern Italy, a dwindling group of elderly men searches for one of the world’s most expensive culinary delicacies.
At first glance, Pig (2021) and The Truffle Hunters (2020) make an unusually literal pairing. Both concern truffles, the people who find them and the animals whose extraordinary noses make the enterprise possible.
But beneath the forest floor lie two rather different examinations of a similar world: one in which something that grows naturally in the earth has become an object of extraordinary commercial value, and where the people closest to its origins are increasingly distant from those who profit from it.
One is a fictional drama starring Nicolas Cage. The other is a documentary about the disappearing traditions of rural Italy. Together, they offer an intriguing perspective on authenticity, companionship, loss and the peculiar economics of luxury.
Two films, two forests, and rather more to dig into than just mushrooms.
First Feature
PIG (2021)
United States | 92 minutes | Director: Michael Sarnoski
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff, Adam Arkin
The things we value, and the things that have a price.
Rob lives alone in the Oregon wilderness, gathering truffles with the assistance of his pig and selling them through a young dealer who supplies Portland’s exclusive restaurants. When the animal is stolen, Rob returns to a world he has deliberately abandoned.
The premise suggests a familiar sort of Nicolas Cage film: a solitary man, a stolen companion and the promise of increasingly extravagant revenge.
Michael Sarnoski has something rather different in mind.
Pig borrows the structure of a revenge thriller while quietly dismantling its conventions. The journey into Portland’s culinary underworld becomes an examination of status, ambition and the distance between the pleasure of food and the elaborate industry constructed around it.
Cage’s performance is unusually restrained. His character is physically dishevelled but emotionally precise, a man whose understanding of food extends far beyond its commercial or social value.
The film is particularly interested in the distinction between creating something meaningful and receiving recognition for having created it.
Programme note: Watch how Sarnoski uses the expectations of the revenge thriller against the audience. Notice, too, the contrast between the natural world and the carefully constructed environments of Portland’s restaurants. What does each setting suggest about the people who inhabit it?
Second Feature
THE TRUFFLE HUNTERS (2020)
Italy / United States / Greece | 84 minutes | Directors: Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw
An old world beneath the trees.
In the forests of Piedmont, northern Italy, a small group of ageing men and their dogs search for the elusive white Alba truffle.
The truffles command extraordinary prices in the international luxury food market, yet the lives of those who find them seem almost entirely removed from the restaurants and wealthy consumers for whom they are destined.
Dweck and Kershaw approach their subjects with a mixture of documentary observation and carefully composed visual tableaux. The camera often remains still, allowing the men, their dogs and their surroundings to occupy the frame without the urgency or explanatory narration familiar from conventional documentaries.
The result sometimes resembles a collection of paintings brought gently to life.
There is considerable humour in the men’s eccentricities and their relationships with their animals, but the film also reveals an increasingly precarious way of life. Competition, secrecy and commercial pressures threaten traditions that depend upon knowledge accumulated over generations.
The relationship between hunter and dog is particularly important. What might appear to outsiders as a simple working arrangement frequently emerges as something much closer to companionship.
Programme note: Pay attention to the film’s compositions and its willingness to let scenes unfold without explanation. Consider also the difference between the hunters’ relationship with the truffle and the value assigned to it by the wider market.
Between the Features
The most obvious connection between these films is also the least interesting.
Truffles provide the narrative machinery, but both films are concerned with the people who exist at the beginning of a chain of commerce and the transformation of something natural into something exclusive.
In Pig, the restaurant world has become a theatre of status and ambition, where the symbolic value of food can overwhelm the simple experience of preparing and eating it. The Truffle Hunters approaches the same industry from the opposite direction, observing the people whose intimate understanding of the landscape makes its luxury possible.
Both films also explore the relationship between humans and animals. Rob’s pig is more than a means of earning a living, just as the hunters’ dogs are more than tools of their trade. The commercial world may assign these animals a value based on what they can find, but their owners understand them in rather different terms.
There is an intriguing contrast in the filmmaking, too. Sarnoski uses a fictional genre framework to lead his audience towards emotional truths, while Dweck and Kershaw photograph reality with such deliberate artistry that it sometimes resembles fiction.
And both films are interested in forms of knowledge that resist easy explanation: the ability to find something hidden beneath the soil, the instinct required to prepare an extraordinary meal, or the understanding that develops between a person and an animal over years of companionship.
Perhaps the most interesting question raised by watching them together is whether the things we value most can ever be adequately measured by what someone else is willing to pay for them.
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