AsianTomato

Like, that's true, but it's not really the point he's making. Gusteau's not saying anyone can be a great artist. But he is saying, "Anyone can cook." It says nothing about greatness. It's encouragement to beginners, saying that you don't need to be anyone special or have any special level of talent. You--yes, you--can follow these instructions and in the end, you will have cooked something, and that's a good thing to do.

Colette is a young fine dining chef in Paris. She learned how to cook professionally in one of the most toxic work cultures on planet earth, and she steeled herself and pushed through in order to excel. After Remy convinces Colette to teach him how to cook, she tries to at first to replicate the ways she was taught in the kitchens of her past, the ways she’d always taken for granted as the only ways to train a rookie into a chef worth anything: brutally reprimanding him for mistakes, raising her voice, letting those ghosts of previous head chefs rise up inside her. And then, in a moment of lucidity, she looks into his big, wet, little rat eyes on a particularly difficult practice day, and sees the hurt there, the confusion, the shame… and she feels her heart quietly break for her younger self and for him, that they both took this kind of abuse, and feels her heart break for her current self, too, about how she’s let herself turn into the kind of chef her younger self had nightmares about, a monster who could make a green cook with big dreams cry.

Trying to replicate this teaching method had been emotionally trying for her, too, and this is the final straw: she shouts this particular epithet or turn of phrase at him, sees how he looks at her… and she flashes back to when that same thing had once been shouted at her through a haze of steam from across a narrow, crowded line when she was in the weeds, her hair falling out of its kerchief and sticking to her neck, the old fan on the wall doing nothing for the hot, humid air but circulate it weakly around the kitchen, and she’d let the sauce split again, how could she be so stupid—