Author: Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

Shimmering silver costumes. Specials on da rocks. Spiteful dancehall girls waiting for their big break. Welcome to the world of Bugsy Malone. Slightly feverish, suffering the consequences from getting too ‘tight’ the night before, I decided to revisit my childhood favourite. My mother protests, “not everyone has had as camp an upbringing as you”, but I really think every child, and film-loving adult, should be made to watch this film. How does a film that merges The Sopranos with Cabaret, is set in New York but was filmed in Slough, relies entirely on a cast of under 15s, and has iconic songs that the children certainly didn’t record themselves, last beyond the bizarreness of 70’s British TV? Charm. 

There’s a cold, deserted New York street where moonlight and outsiders dare to tread. The sound of frantic footsteps dart behind a brown stone, disturbing the alley-cats and a mother at her wit’s end. Shouting. The arrival of the gang in this dead-end spot signals the struggle. Roxy the Weasel, covered in deadly custard, lies in the gutter. Cut to song. 

Gang warfare, the Mob, showgirls who sing suggestively to an audience of mobsters, politicians, and wise guys, shoot-outs and lock-ins. Most children’s films would try and distance themselves away from this crime-ridden world, even if it’s romantically portrayed in 1920’s glamour and gowns.  Part of Bugsy’s magic is that it’s a film for children, starring children, yet why treat children like kids, give them a film that grows up with them. Children aren’t as afraid of playing in a grown-up space as we often believe, Bugsy accepts this and cuts out the middleman by making the kids the heroes without diluting their characters or stories. ‘Namby-pamby showgirls’ are criticised by tedious casting directors, all 13 still, who effortlessly deliver lines exclaiming how they could ‘do something’ with that ‘great face’. From Fat Sam’s Tony Soprano reminiscent demeanour, to passing waitresses and agents, all the characters are given their time to play pretend at full, convincing pelt. The moustaches drawn on with pencils, eyes gaze up as Tallulah glides across the stage ready to start her number, she rolls her eyes in tired professionalism, winking at mobsters and factory workers alike. She opens her mouth ready to sing. ‘My name is Tallulah, I live ‘til I die’. Whilst it may sound like a perfect copy of a showtune, it sounds like a copy written by the kids based off snippets of songs heard through their parents’ records with their innocence of songwriting shining through. This is a musical that wants to feel like a child’s game, and it’s terrific. 

A world powered by peddle-powered cars that are constantly running from the creek of peddle chains belonging to rival mobs, where characters retire from a stressful day with a cocktail and a cabaret, guns that actually shoot; it’s all rather charming. Age appropriateness without patronising. The gusto to the commitment of Bugsy being a mob film is fabulous without pretension; language, names and settings are all so perfectly in keeping with the genre, why sacrifice any of the more cert 15 bits? Despite this age-blind approach, the film gives no sour stage-school taste. Jazz hands are firmly excluded from this speakeasy. Jodie Foster, who plays the wickedly witty chanteuse Tallulah, arrived at the Bugsy set fresh from the scenes of Taxi Driver; these are children who are already immersed into the adult world of acting, why not let them play-pretend as adults, but without the bullets? 

Bugsy finishes galivanting through 1929’s Little Italy with a Leone style shootout. Fat Sam’s Grand Slam is covered in cream, the volume of which almost ventures into the absurd. The glittering girls are dulled. The piano keys glue together under the warfare. Tallulah lets out her last quip, ‘so this is show business’, as she wipes the custard from her eyes. In the normal world, this is catastrophic, a merciless shooting of an entire speakeasy. Yet in Bugsy’s world, it is the perfect finale to extended game of dress up. The previously deadly custard bullets loose all killing potential, causing all to erupt into a custard coated final number. The costumes must all go back into the box, the kids must go back to their respective houses for tea, and they turn back into kids once more – just kids, having fun. Whilst they are convincing and almost scarily good at dressing up as adults, Bugsy Malone has managed to escape a fate of being caged into the weird children’s media of the 1970s by keeping a surreal sense of fun and games close to its chest. They ‘could’a been anythin’ they wanted to be’ and they chose to be fun. 

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

Tattoos drawn on with eyeliner borrowed from the girlfriend in the Coppola-style Marie Antoinette costume. A fitted white t-shirt. Greased hair that looks like an effortless “F you, world” to what other people would call showering before work, but really took 45 minutes and a fine-tooth comb to perfect. Carmen “Carmy” Berzattos were en masse last Halloween. “Yes Chef!” has become a dog-whistle amongst those who want to signal to others that they too have watched the hit, Grammy- winning TV show, The  Bear. Yet, this phenomenon is not down to one TV show, this is a legacy finally taking hold. Chefs are cool thanks to Anthony Bourdain.

Bursting onto the scene in the 90s, Bourdain’s New Yorker article Don’t Read This Before Eating, which later became the basis of the remarkably cool Kitchen Confidential, took the lid off from this edgy underground hidden in plain sight. The Escoffier notions of overly gastronomic, mustache twisting chefs have since been fleeting; chefs are cool people, who just happen to like good food. When Bourdain criticises people who order well-done steaks it feels like an in-joke, stove-top banter, not the scathing judgment of some worn out Cordon Bleu alumni. His writing, his intensity, both in print and on screen, strikes us as simply friendly, never passing judgment, at least not too severely. 

​Bourdain scoffs “who cares” when told his Georgian dumplings “aren’t very sophisticated”; if the food is good the food is good, no two ways, two stars about it. “I eat a lot of shit”, remarks Bourdain about filming Parts Unknown, for Bourdain the food was glue holding his show, and career, together. We eat to explore, and each meal tells a story about an area. Fresh out the fryer, scotch eggs arrive, yoke dripping down the chin to escape a greedy end, a pub that feels like the smoking ban never came into place – why do we eat here? And why does it taste so good here? The bún chả eaten in a front room restaurant in Hanoi with Obama, the overly truffled animal rights nightmare of a meal eaten in Montreal, all receive equal praise. 

Unlike Obama, Bourdain refuses to travel with cars and escorts that equate to the protection of a US backed and built nuclear bomb shelter; he slips in and does as the Romans do, even if that means crashing a Shanghai wedding to experience Chinese drinking culture in full force. Everyone in Vietnam, President or not, eats off plastic stools on the pavement, no reservations, no table service – just something steaming and delicious with a cold beer. There is no brashness. No guidebook. No Michelin guide. Just people eating a meal and being human. Bourdain wants Americans to have passports and to use them, and what better way to persuade people to get to know a stranger in a strange land than through our voracious need for the delicious. Food is shown to be an experience, a political moment, a zeitgeist of the area. “The smell: that’s the first thing that hits you, promising everything in exchange for your soul”, quotes Bourdain as he introduces us to Hanoi. The smell of incense pours from every size temple, a split keg from last night’s bia hơi leaves a tang within these notes, humidity colours the streetside with impossibly green plants that sweat against the fumes of thousands of mopeds, against these endlessly moving bikes aunties and workmen sit alike letting their lotus tea and thick, treacly coffee steam into the air, sizzling herbs and simmering pots of a bone broth left to bubble up the smell of something amazing and only to be slurped down in an almost religious trance, gulping to savour this fleeting flavour forever, the smell of life everywhere.

For his American audience this is monumental. This is Vietnam without the war. This is a place at ease, a place that in so many ways is like theirs – if only they took the time to join the flow of thousands of Vietnamese people on the streets of Hanoi, to throw away their ideas of what dining should be, to sit on a plastic stool and enjoy the experience that we call eating. This is Bourdain’s rock-star in a chef’s hat legacy on travel; leave your expectations behind and get ready to experience the chaotic, friendly, altering reality of immersion. Whatever the local delicacy is, there is a care to show it at its most organic state, be that be on a boat on the Congo, or in a pub with Nigella. All food is good, why be pretentious about eating a Jollibee ‘jolly spaghetti’ or eating freshly hunted game from A.A Gill’s estate if that’s what you’re meant to do to have a good time?  

That is what essentially being a chef comes down to, ensuring people have a good time from whatever you can provide for them in the under 30 minutes wait time it takes to pan fry fresh trout, reduce a jus, and shout at your KP for being a slow ‘mal carne’. Bourdain exposed us to real eating, real kitchens, real people. Food is not aspex coated truffles from some unpronounceable 20km radius of Tuscany, it’s where people flock to have a good time over. Kitchens are not in fact military operations, but made of people who know what people like, and have a good time doing it. Revisiting his first experience in a kitchen in Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain introduces us to a Down and Out reminiscent Orwellian underworld, although this time with slightly better worker’s rights; temperatures are high, and temperaments are higher. The air is perfumed with seafood, garlic, and hints of cigarette smoke. Knives flash and pans blaze. Someone’s speaker is swelling with old school rock as another FOH gets bollocked for not being able to operate within this mystic backroom. Grill chefs show off their newly formed scars as the KP’s hands break out in soapy soars. The EPOS machine whirrs. Baptisms happen over the pastry station as a rookie earns his stripes in this misfit’s lair. These characters may be loud, mean, and sometimes dangerous, yet they know how to transform a place of relentless 12 hour  work days into a community. Food isn’t a chef’s armoury, it’s they’re ability to understand people, in and out the kitchen. Walking into my first day as a chef 8 months ago, I realised this. We may have been working through a heatwave in a poorly ventilated kitchen with 6 tickets racked up and waiting, but I was welcome and cared for in a way like no other. I adopted the name ‘chef’ and joined. 

Carmy No.4 of the party is starting to waiver. He trudges up to the bathroom, wobbling against every instinct telling him to lie down and not summit that treacherous peak of the staircase. He may have whacked a pizza in the oven for dinner and hasn’t cooked something that would take longer than 15 minutes to prepare in months, but he knows he loves food. He knows The Bear was a good show for more than just it’s writing and Jermey Allen White, he felt tension like no other watching Boiling Point, and when Thomas Straker’s homemade butter or WhatWillyCook’s loaded breakfast crumpets videos appear on his for you page, he never scrolls past. Even being one of many counterfeit Carmies has given him a taste of that chef community, the chef respectability advertised to him. Bob Ross passes him with a “Behind, chef.” as Carmy No.4 rolls a cigarette and prepares to enter the rabble once again. Eating is cool. Being a chef – cooler.