A couple are picking wild mushrooms to sell to chic restaurants. One of them offers her a job. While her culinary star is rising, their relationship goes downhill. The film, which cleverly latches onto the foraging trend, cuts through the love tragedy with poetic portraits of mushrooms.
A couple lives off picking wild mushrooms. They get up before dawn, set off into the woods and sell their harvest to restaurants in New York. He is a monomaniac expert, she is more practical. It’s a hard and insecure existence, and that’s why they decide to take a job cooking at a trendy restaurant.
Cortlund and Halperin juxtapose the fictional story about the growing distance between the two lovers with pictures of the seasons passing and beautiful close-ups of mushrooms in the wild - from the deadly poisonous yet beautiful toadstool known as the Destroying Angel (amanita verna) to the bizarre looking Bear’s Tooth (hericium erinaceous) and the delicious Porcino (boletus edulis). The preparation of the food is also portrayed accurately.
Now, Forager provides a counterbalance to the often romantic picture of cooking and eating in films with a culinary bent and meshes perfectly with today’s Slow-Food movement.
