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Clip description
Tom (Matthew Goode) fields repeated phone calls from two different women as he goes about his daily work of selecting food for his restaurant from the wholesalers.
Curator’s notes
The sequence gives a good sense of Tom’s toxic stress levels and his short temper as he goes about his daily work.
The hanging carcasses in the butcher’s cold room are an authentic detail from a chef’s life but can be read as a metaphor for the way Tom treats the women in his life.
Shots of a lobster will be used as a motif throughout the film. The significance of the lobster is ambiguous: it could represent the way he feels out of his element, but could also refer to the helpless state of a loved one. This is a charged moment. He stares at the creature as if in a daze; ambient sound is replaced by dreamy music.
